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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



The City and its Uncertain Walls

by
Murakami Haruki


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase The City and its Uncertain Walls


Title: The City and its Uncertain Walls
Author: Murakami Haruki
Genre: Novel
Written: 2023 (Eng. 2024)
Length: 449 pages
Original in: Japanese
Availability: The City and its Uncertain Walls - US
The City and its Uncertain Walls - UK
The City and its Uncertain Walls - Canada
La cité aux murs incertains - France
Die Stadt und ihre ungewisse Mauer - Deutschland
La città e le sue mura incerte - Italia
La ciudad y sus muros inciertos - España
from: Bookshop.org (US)
  • Japanese title: 街とその不確かな壁
  • Translated by Philip Gabriel
  • With an Afterword by the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : rich and satisfying

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
Financial Times C 7/11/2024 John Self
The Guardian . 27/11/2024 AK Blakemore
The Japan Times . 19/11/2024 Thu-Huong Ha
The LA Times . 16/11/2024 Renee Simms
The NY Times Book rev. . 1/12/2024 Junot Díaz
The Observer D 10/11/2024 Alex Preston
El País . 9/4/2024 Leonardo Padura
The Telegraph A 5/11/2024 Erica Wagner
The Times . 15/11/2024 James Riding
TLS . 22/11/2024 Michael LaPointe
Wall St. Journal B 15/11/2024 Boyd Tonkin
The Washington Post . 15/11/2024 J.R.Clark
Die Welt . 30/1/2024 Peter Praschl
Die Zeit . 11/1/2024 Ronald Düker


  From the Reviews:
  • "It’s all very loose and meandering, but then with Murakami the meandering is largely the point. He glances at ideas but never stares them down. He gestures towards meaning and leaves the reader to sort it all out: the walled town is the man’s subconscious, perhaps. (...) The problem with this is that not seeking to establish what’s really real (...) gives the story little emotional grounding. The casual, contingent tone that qualifies many of the narrator’s experiences (...) is maddeningly evasive, adding further to the feel of a young adult novel. Still, there are moments of great charm and beauty here" - John Self, Financial Times

  • "(A)s a reader, this protracted, foggy and self-referential novel feels ultimately scant in its rewards. (...) Murakami drops hints like anvils on the implausibly jejune reader who might be plodding along in ignorance of the setting’s polysemic metaphorical power. (...) Despite this heavy handedness, the walled city chapters are compelling. Murakami blends the whimsical and the threatening with the skill of that other pre-eminent Japanese visionary, Hayao Miyazaki (.....) Yes: the novel becomes like watching a fish rolling through the dark depths of a pond, before it vanishes from sight with a flicker of its tail. Mesmeric, to a certain extent, but ultimately deficient." - AK Blakemore, The Guardian

  • "Trying to make sense of a Murakami world is like a donkey trying to unpick a quilt. The text is littered with dubious analogies (...) and half-hearted ones (.....) What’s real and what’s not, what makes sense and what doesn’t, is just ... shrug emoji. Underneath the symbolic red herrings, there is something Murakami seems to want to say, if he can swallow the thing that’s been stuck in his throat since the 1980s." - Thu-Huong Ha, The Japan Times

  • "The context of the pandemic is especially present at the novel’s end. The beginning, though, is for hardcore Murakami fans." - Renee Simms, The Los Angeles Times

  • "Boy wants girl, but girl, in a Scheherazade move, gives boy a creepy city instead. (...) In a novel obsessed with hauntings -- whether it be the lost girl or the affable ghost that appears later in the novel -- it is perhaps fitting that the book itself is haunted by its earlier iterations. (...) Like the characters in the books, divided between their real selves and their fading shadows, I found myself divided as a reader, both inside The City and Its Uncertain Walls and outside. My shadow self couldn’t shake the sense that Murakami has told this story better elsewhere, or that the novel’s obsessive focus on the narrator’s aimless woes didn’t do its characterization, world-building or psychological depth any favors." - Junot Díaz, The New York Times Book Review

  • "(T)here is something almost pathological in the way his writing refuses to move on. (...) There is little here that passes for plot (...) There is an endless central section set in a library in the “real” world (...) Bad magical realism lacks both magic and realism, and The City and its Uncertain Walls should take its place alongside Coelho’s The Alchemist, Fowles’s The Magus, Gibran’s The Prophet and any number of other books that you can just about be forgiven for admiring as a teenager but which, to an adult reader, offer little more than embarrassment." - Alex Preston, The Observer

  • "Recounting the plot doesn’t serve this novel well. (...) What is quietly miraculous is how the novel concretises as it builds, the dreamscape becoming the world we, and the narrator, inhabit. The smallest details remind us of the mythic nature of the universe the author creates (.....) Others may perceive this novel and its motifs very differently; but that is high praise. The greatest books, after all, are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami’s narrator enters his mysterious libraries." - Erica Wagner, The Telegraph

  • "Murakami has his familiar style and his latest novel is not without its currents of existential Zen and passages of acuity. When he deigns to specificity the results can be arrestingly tactile, such as his description of the friction of pushing between different worlds “like grains of different sizes mixed together”. His sense of the uncanny is intact. Yet The City and Its Uncertain Walls is an inferior remix. Here is a writer in his seventies who cannot leave his younger, fresher work be." - James Riding, The Times

  • "Ghosts, unicorns, hidden realms -- The City and Its Uncertain Walls might sound like heady, fantastical stuff. But these are just colourful touches, applied to add contrast to a minimalist story of lost love that doubles as a stress test of the porous wall between artifice and reality. The blueprint of the novel is impressive, and when Haruki Murakami does allow himself to be specific about his nameless characters, the results can be touching. But more generally the novel feels serene in the same bloodless way that life does in the imaginary town. (...) (O)ver hundreds of pages the effect can be drowsy." - Michael LaPointe, Times Literary Supplement

  • "i<>The City and Its Uncertain Walls bears witness to his enduring vision of a world in which “the real and the unreal coexist” on equal terms. It shows, too, how his style and method have evolved. (...) This eerie landscape of snows, forests and torrents is beautifully evoked as Mr. Murakami the seasoned storyteller of loss, loneliness and passing time takes charge. The action dawdles, then leaps, with a trademark blend of soap opera and sublimity. In deadpan, slow-burn, quietly hypnotic prose, delicately conveyed in Mr. Gabriel’s translation, our narrator settles into a becalmed life as guardian of the small-town library stacks. But in a Murakami novel, normality won’t persist for long. (...) (An) often droll, occasionally dull, but oddly irresistible fable" - Boyd Tonkin, Walll Street Journal

  • "His imagination is one of a kind, and his blend of pop culture, postmodernism and Japanese mythology is a wholly unique contribution to literature. But returning to such a familiar setting, along with employing the plots and themes he favors, adds a greater sense of fatigue, at least for this reader. (...) Devoted readers of Murakami know these obsessions all too well and might feel a staleness take hold of them here. Perhaps those less familiar with Murakami will be as enchanted by his worlds as I once was and hope to be again in the future." - Jonathan Russell Clark, The Washington Post

  • "Wie oft, während man Murakami liest, fragt man sich, ob man die Geschichte nicht schon gelesen hat. Man erkennt vieles in ihr wieder (.....) Mag sein, dass sich das über Literatur immer sagen lässt; aber bei Murakami fällt es einem eher auf, weil seine nicht darauf zu bestehen scheint, sich als Werk dem Leser gegenüber abzugrenzen, sondern es regelrecht darauf anlegt, in seinem Bewusstseinsstrom zu schwimmen." - Peter Praschl, Die Welt

  • "Ein bisschen viel des Guten ? Der Bedeutsamkeitsdruck ist jedenfalls beachtlich. Und man kann sich die Enträtselungsvorhaben schon vorstellen, zu denen Lesegruppen gegründet und Seminararbeiten abgegeben werden dürften." - Ronald Düker, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The first part of The City and its Uncertain Walls is presented in more or less alternating chapters, in not so much alternating time- as place-lines. In the one, set in the recognizable, familiar, everyday world, the narrator recounts his first, great love, a girl he met when they were both still teenagers in high school. He addresses much of this account to her -- neither of them ever named ("At that time neither you nor I had names") -- and recalls their months together, exchanging letters, talking endlessly, as well as making out some ("We never went beyond that, though"). They went to separate schools, and lived at some distance from one another -- "Not far away, but not so close that we could drop by whenever we wanted" -- and so only saw each other occasionally.
       The girl tells the narrator about a town -- one where, she says: "The real me lives", working in a library:

The me here with you now isn't the real me. It's only a stand-in. Like a wandering shadow.
       Surrounded by a wall, it is also a difficult town to enter (and even more so to leave) -- but the girl assures him that if he can find it, and as long as he is seeking the real her, he would be able to get in. There's even a position already available for him -- as a 'Dream Reader'. ("All you need to do is read all the old dreams collected on the shelves of the library".) There is one catch, however, the real version of the girl won't recognize him or remember anything about him.
       The narrator alternatingly tells of their real-life youthful relationship as well as then his experiences in this mystical town -- which he does indeed reach and where he does encounter the girl again, though: "you were still sixteen, I was no longer seventeen. For you I was now a grown man, far older than you" (while: "She was sixteen. For her, time stood still at that age").
       When he entered the town, the narrator had to give up his shadow; no one here has one: "You either leave him here or give up on going inside", the Gatekeeper at the town's sole entrance had told him. The Gatekeeper rips his shadow off, and they become separate entities; the shadow lives on as well, the Gatekeeper giving him room and board and asking him to help out with various tasks; still: "Shadows separated from the body are like plants without roots. They don't live long".
       The town is also a Hotel California-type situation:
     "This gate is the sole entrance to the town," the Gatekeeper said, pointing a plump finger at the gate. "Once a person passes through and goes inside, they can't ever go outside again. The wall doesn't allow it. That's the rule.
       Eventually, the narrator's shadow weakens, and this storyline builds up to whether or not the narrator will try to be reünited with his shadow -- and whether he/they will try to escape the town. Even as he is uncertain about whether it would be possible to leave, he wonders: "Which world should I belong to ? I couldn't decide".
       Meanwhile, however, he adjusts to a very simple life there, working as a Dream Reader -- apparently the only one in the peculiar, in many ways lifeless -- certainly under-populated -- town. He has his doubts about his abilities -- "Maybe I didn't have what it took to do the job ?" -- but he keeps at it.
       The storyline about his teen-relationship with the girl continues as well, to the point where she disappears from his life, with one last letter -- and how he stumbles on after that, going to college, getting a job (with a book distribution company) -- and never finding a woman he could settle down with: "in the end, I could never build a genuine relationship built on trust with any woman I dated". He putters on, to age forty five -- and then, metaphorically and physically: "I once again fell into a hole".
       The second, longest part of the novel finds the narrator (back) in the real world, in his mid-forties, working at the book distribution company, and soon quitting his job: "I simply felt that this reality wasn't suited to me". He can't go (back) to the mystical town -- but another, if more down-to-earth, opportunity presents itself. He sets his sights on working in a library, and a former co-worker helps him find a position -- at an unusual town library in a small place in Fukushima, Z**.
       The narrator travels to Z** for an interview, meeting the Head Librarian, Tatsuya Koyasu, whose position he would be assuming. Koyasu is not exactly who he first seems -- and not just because he wears a skirt --, but it takes the narrator quite a while until he realizes that; the interview itself is a mere formality, and the narrator gets and takes the job. Koyasu then continues to be an occasional helpful presence in dealing with what also turns out to be a somewhat unusual town.
       As in the mystical town, the narrator lives a simple, isolated life, with little human interaction -- though here at least at work there is a pretty busy and efficient library staff. Eventually, he also makes the acquaintance of a woman who also recently moved here, buying a business -- "A coffee shop without a name". (The woman, too, remains unnamed, as Murakami plays with nameless-ness throughout the novel, the narrator noting of his seventeen-year-old self and his sixteen-year-old-love: "At that time neither you nor I had names"; among the oddities/disappointments in the novel is that the final letter he received from her as a teen is apparently signed (presented as: "** [Your name]" in the text), even as elsewhere (also with her town-alter-ego/'real' self) her name is never mentioned or alluded to.)
       A relationship develops between the coffee shop-owner and the narrator but, as with his sixteen-year-old love, is not consummated. The girl had told him she wanted to give herself to him, but she wasn't ready yet; the mature woman now is someone for whom sex is so physically unpleasant that she has no interest in it (one of the reasons she got divorced); just as the town has an impregnable wall, she even armors herself against the possibility ..... This lack of sexual fulfillment is one of the novel's curious themes; it doesn't seem to bother the narrator too much, but there's an undertow -- occasionally surfacing -- of great sexual tension throughout.
       Another local figure in Z**, a young boy from a prominent family, also then comes to play a significant role. He practically never speaks, but is an avid and intense reader; he learns about the mystical town and is determined to go there .....
       The short third and final part brings the story to its conclusion, if not a simple, clear resolution.
       At one point, around half way through the novel, the narrator finds:
     With a small creaking sound, the reality around me was cracking ever so slightly. Assuming that this was, in fact, reality.
       Murakami leaves readers similarly uncertain of how firm the ground beneath them is. There's a duality to many of the significant figures -- me and my shadow, as it were -- and the question of connecting with or being separated from oneself (as in the teen girlfriend, sure her other, 'real' self is out there) seems more significant than connection with others. Tellingly, only secondary characters have significant others in their lives, while the most prominent -- including the two versions of the teen girl, as well as Koyasu -- have lost, or never had their better (or at least other) half. Those who had been in traditional relationships -- the coffee shop owner and Koyasu were both married -- could not sustain them, for reasons beyond their control (with Koyasu's loss of self(s) having gone even further by the time the narrator gets to know him).
       With quite a few dreams -- mostly the narrator's, rather than the one he reads in his erstwhile professional capacity -- and fantastical elements, such as the beasts the Gatekeeper sees to in the mystical town, or the town's seeming un-mappability (as well as the whole 'Dream Reader'-concept), and the many identity-questions/issues (as well as the odd hole here and there), The City and its Uncertain Walls is typical Murakami fare, with reality on the one hand so simple, but then so warped at its edges.
       The City and its Uncertain Walls is basically a novel about longing(s) and seeking -- more even for self than for an other, a person to be with, as the main characters are isolated and, decidedly, un-joined (no one's having sex; they're missing their shadows, etc.). The novel meanders along, much as the narrator does, only rarely forcing the issue(s), and this works very well. Even -- or especially -- without a neat resolution (much as the narrator's teen-relationship never found one, then or later), it is a very satisfying read, appealingly suggestive without trying to be meaning-full. (Note, however, that much of the critical reaction sees it very differently -- more tiresome mess .....)

       Murakami also includes an Afterword, explaining the novel's origins in a novella he published in 1980, the one work of his that, however: "was never published as a book, either in Japan or in other countries". He continued to engage with the material, however, and: "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was one response to the original story" (explaining the overlap of some of elements found here) -- and this now is a final reworking of it.

- M.A.Orthofer, 13 November 2024

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Links:

The City and its Uncertain Walls: Reviews: Murakami Haruki: Other books by Murakami Haruki under review: Books about Murakami Haruki under review: Other books of interest under review:
  • See Index of Japanese literature at the complete review

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About the Author:

       Japanese author Murakami Haruki (村上春樹) was born January 12, 1949. He attended Waseda University. He has written several internationally acclaimed bestsellers and is among the best-known contemporary Japanese writers.

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© 2024 the complete review

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