When Haruki Murakami Takes His Own Magic for Granted
7 min read
Haruki Murakami’s new novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, features an imaginary world that is both intricate and baffling: A parallel universe contains a walled city, which contains a library, which contains orbs that contain people’s dreams. Exploring them is an unnamed, middle-aged narrator accompanied by a teenage girl whom he somehow met decades ago. Moving back and forth between this universe and mundane reality, he begins to wonder which version of himself is the real one—the “Dream Reader” or the bored employee of a Tokyo book distributor. For Murakami’s millions of readers, this confounding premise will sound familiar, even exciting, especially because the new book shares many elements with his first major novel, the confidently weird and exciting Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Both stories could serve as metaphors for the beguiling, febrile experience of reading Murakami’s best fiction. As his new narrator puts it: “Lots of questions, but no clear-cut answers. The meaning of it all totally eluded me. Many mysterious doors before me, but no key that fit. What I could understand (or faintly perceive) was that there was an extraordinary, special power at work.”
The narrator is describing his lonely, searching life but also evoking and drawing on the allure of the Murakami-verse, a body of work that feels both labyrinthine and accessible. In this balance lies the bravura, idiosyncratic source of Murakami’s popularity. Like Hemingway’s simple sentences, this style is harder than it looks to achieve; also like Hemingway, Murakami doesn’t always pull it off.
The 75-year-old writer’s novels and stories, which are marked by a distinct combination of strange happenings and plainspoken feelings, have been translated into more than 50 languages. This new novel, his first release in the United States in six years, was his native Japan’s best-selling book for six months in 2023, “beating out a guidebook for the latest Pokemon game on Nintendo Switch,” according to The Japan Times. At the same time, Murakami commands close attention from critics and scholars, and most Octobers, his name comes up in Nobel Prize predictions. His new novel, however, rests on this blend of high and broad appeal without, in the end, either justifying or deepening it. Only the already initiated are allowed entry into the walled-in city of Murakami’s imagination; the rest are left to wander about, casualties of what reads a lot like presumption, if not self-satisfaction.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls begins, promisingly, like a fable: The narrator speaks directly to the young woman, remembering their teenage romance with lyric clarity, as conveyed by the longtime Murakami translator Philip Gabriel: “On that summer evening we were heading up the river, the sweet fragrance of grass wafting over us … You’d stuck your flat red sandals in your yellow plastic shoulder bag and were walking from one sandbank to the next, just ahead of me. Wet blades of grass were pasted to your wet calves, wonderful green punctuation marks.” The young woman had told him at the time about a distant town: “The real me lives there, in that town surrounded by a wall.”
Were this a story from the Middle Ages, we’d recognize this as a message-bearing allegory: We reserve our most private and truest self for people who prove worthy; often, they must undertake a difficult journey to reach us. The narrator, as a young man, begins visiting this town, where time never passes, in chapters that contrast with his stale school and family life in “the real world.” With gratitude and wonder, he marvels that he and his girlfriend are able to “create and share a special, secret world of our own.” That said, something both basic and profound separates them (although Murakami never really accounts for it): The narrator retains a single identity and consciousness across both worlds, whereas the unnamed girlfriend splits in two—the real-world version, who knows about the city, and the one who lives there and seems to be unaware of the other reality.
The IRL girlfriend disappears suddenly from the narrator’s (real) life, cutting off his access to the walled-in city. Some 20 years later, all grown up into a standard Murakami man—listless, shy, introspective—he drudges through his day job in Tokyo, his existence enlivened only by memories of that more vivid world. At melancholic loose ends, he leaves the capital to work as a librarian in a remote village. There, he meets a chatty old man. With his subtle guidance, the narrator finds his way back to the walled-in city, where he reencounters his girlfriend, who is still a teenager—and who has no memory of him. No matter; he’s largely pleased just to be there, spending time with her, sipping tea, and reading the orb-shaped dreams housed in the city’s library.
There are clear parallels between this library and its real-world equivalent in the village, but what does it mean to read a dream rather than a book? The narrator holds an orb for “about five minutes,” feels a warm glow, and “then the dreams would begin to spin their way into me, hesitantly, at first, like a silkworm emitting a thread, then with more enthusiasm. They had something they needed to relate.” This act of dream-reading both enlarges his life and frees the dreams from their shelves. We are again in the realm of allegory: This is what happens when readers and books come together. Murakami offers variations on this theme throughout the novel. Some readers may feel flattered and affirmed by the analogy, ensorcelled by the Murakami-verse. Others may want him to do more with the story itself—for instance, to describe more of those library dreams instead of mostly just rhapsodizing over the experience of handling them.
Some genuine drama develops back in the village. The narrator befriends a quietly intense boy who spends his days reading in the (real-world) library. The boy shows the narrator an unnervingly accurate map of the other place; we learn that he “found a way to get to the walled-in town (though I had no idea how).” After the boy disappears into that world, his brothers ask the narrator for help: Does he have the boy’s map? He says no. “This was a lie,” he tells us. “The map was in a drawer back in my house. But I didn’t feel like showing it to them.”
The brothers are eager to recover the boy. To the narrator, however (and perhaps to Murakami), they are banal workaday types who want to trap the boy in a reality where he’s treated like a misfit. Wouldn’t it be better, the narrator thinks, for the boy to explore dreams and meet unicorns? And—to extend the now-too-obvious allegory—isn’t it the heroic work of writers to bestow imagined worlds on readers, especially those who struggle in the rest of their life? This is an attractive idea, though morally unsettling—especially in the novel. The narrator is withholding information from a family seeking a lost child. Murakami, for his part, is withholding context—without knowing more about the city’s strange dreams, the reader must take it on faith that they justify abandoning reality. And the narrator isn’t unreliable or even conflicted: You read fruitlessly in hopes of sussing out as much. Murakami doesn’t only gloss over ethical questions; he lets the subplot of the missing boy recede, and leaves unexplored the implications of submitting so completely to the power of stories.
The novel’s action instead moves on to yet more sweet-toned labors in the dream library, with a pointed shout-out to Gabriel García Márquez along the way. The narrator calls the author’s work “ordinary” rather than “magical” realism, because “in the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes the scenes the way he sees them.” This is clearly Murakami explaining, if not defending, his own method: a kind of imaginative liberation from the conventional coherences of novels that just reflect and ratify the stifling world as it is.
But as heretical as this might be to say about a Murakami novel, I simply wanted this one to make more sense—in terms of plot, character, ideas, and world-building—and to do so on its own terms instead of depending on buttressing from other works, whether those by Márquez or by Murakami himself. Yes, longtime fans will fill in the gaps, especially given the many explicit connections to Hard-Boiled Wonderland (which also features a dream reader in a mysterious library, albeit with a day job at a data factory). And beyond the dream eggs and Murakami-brand Easter eggs, less devoted readers will nevertheless recognize, perhaps too readily, patterns that recur across his many other books: parallel worlds and competing realities, ordinary people on a quest to find a loved one, mysterious guides with unclear motives, symbolically significant libraries, objectifying descriptions of women’s bodies.
Maybe as a sign of his own misgivings about the novel’s stand-alone status, Murakami includes an afterword in which he discusses its origins in a 1980 short story, which was also the source material for Hard-Boiled Wonderland; its gestation as he evolved from a jazz-café proprietor into a globally famous novelist; and, finally, its pandemic-era revival and completion.
All of this is interesting if you’re keen to be let in on a famous writer’s story-making secrets at a late stage in his career—but alas, it’s not much more. Because what really drives most of us to stay with a big and difficult novel is our desire to figure out what’s happening, in higher-order ways if not merely on a literal level, so that our ideas about stories, or the world, or ourselves, or, ideally, all of that, are changed. Murakami’s best books magnificently bend these questions into weird and exhilarating shapes. This new one soft-boils them.
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