The City? Walls???

I eagerly look forward to each new Haruki Murakami book, but in the last few years they've ceased to be day-one events for me. I have really fond memories of midnight release parties at Green Apple Books, mingling with other literature fans as we nibbled on Japanese sweets and played trivia games while waiting for the latest novel to officially go on sale. Part of that was disrupted by the pandemic, and I've also felt a bit underwhelmed by the last couple of books from him. I still like them, but it's hard to keep that magic going after so many years.

 

That said, "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" is my favorite Murakami book in a while, probably since 1Q84.

MINI SPOILERS

Which is kind of interesting. A recent gripe I had with "Men Without Women" was that after reading Murakami for long enough, the tropes get to be a bit too noticeable. Passive male protagonist: check. Missing persons and/or things: check. Cooking spaghetti: check. Earlobes: check. Wells: check. Moons: check. Inscrutable women: check. And so on. Things that seem especially magical and otherworldly the first time you read them start to feel cliche after a while.

The writing in TCaIUW felt especially engaging and compelling. Which is especially funny after my complaints about repeating tropes, since by the second chapter or so I was going "Wait a minute... haven't I read this book before?!" It was super-duper-familiar, and not just in a deja vu sort of way, but I was positive I'd read it before. The protagonist was in a town filled with unicorns, worked in a library reading dreams, there was a high wall around the town, he'd been separated from his shadow... I knew that I'd read all this before. It didn't take too long to click into place: this was one of the two alternating stories of "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World", one of my favorite novels.

In Hard-Boiled, the novel alternated between two seemingly unconnected stories. The "noir" story had a great detective character, very sardonic and brash, whose investigations lead him literally underground, where he encounters the INKlings (Intra-Nocturnal Kappa). The "fantasy" story was the one I was reading now, with the town with the unicorns and a high wall and a shadow and stuff. It was very unclear how, or even if, the stories tied together: was the detective the man's shadow? Were the INKlings connected to the unicorns?

TCaIUW starts off with a similarly alternating structure, but this time, the linkage is very clear. The first story - let's call it the "real world" - is narrated from the first person to the second person. The narrator/protagonist is a nameless boy, 16 years old at the start, who has fallen in love with a 15 year old girl. We learn that these two teenagers, in their romantic but chaste relationship, came up with the city together: based on dreams from the girl and conversations between the two of them, they invent the many details of this otherworldly city. Much later, the girl gives a confession: the "real" her actually lives in that imaginary city, and the version of her on Earth is just her shadow. In this novel, the "fantasy" part occurs when the boy, now grown up, somehow manages to cross over into that city, seeking the great love of his life.

There's a lot of great fracturing over the course of the story. The division between the man and his shadow is really poignant. He is sort of able to reconnect with the girl from his youth, but this version of her has no memory of anything outside of the town, and definitely no feelings towards him. Near the end of the "fantasy" portion the main rejoins his shadow and they prepare to escape, but at the last moment the man decides to stay behind in the town while his shadow leaves. And yet, despite choosing to stay, he wakes up again back in the real world, reunited with his (now mute) shadow.

This leads into a really nice passage where the man quits his job working for a publishing company and moves to a small rural town to be a librarian. There are more odd characters here and mysteries that are gradually revealed, bringing more of a supernatural element into the real world. Some of the most startling moments in the book occur when something from the fantasy/dream world appears in the real world, like seeing that the old head librarian casts no shadow, and wears a watch without any hands, and receiving a highly detailed map of the walled city from an autistic boy.

MEGA SPOILERS

The fracturing continues. The boy M** disappears, crossing over into the fantasy world. The man is bitten in his ear during a dream, and subsequently the narrative shifts back into the fantasy world, where the man is once again, but without any memory of his time back on earth. He sees the same autistic boy, but does not recognize him at all. This leads me to wonder: maybe the man didn't return to Earth after all. Maybe it was only his shadow that did. But his shadow thought he was the real man.

This is a vaguely disquieting thought, which is why I particularly appreciated that Murakami addressed it. In one earlier conversation with Mr. Koyasu:

"Sometimes I just don't understand myself," I admitted honestly. "Maybe I've lost sight of me. I don't have a sense that I'm living this life as myself, as the real me. Sometimes I think I'm merely a shadow. When I feel that way, I get this restless feeling, like I'm simply tracing an outline of myself, cleverly pretending to be me."

"The real self and his shadow are essentially two sides of the same coin," Mr. Koyasu said in a quiet voice. "Depending on the circumstances, they can change roles. That's how people can overcome troubles and survive. And tracing something and pretending to be something are very important sometimes. It's nothing to be concerned about. Because the person here right now is indeed you."

There's so much to unpack here! I don't think Murakami really goes in for allegory, but my mind immediately goes towards trauma in the second paragraph here. When someone goes through a traumatic experience, they often need to dissociate, locking away their "real self" and inhabiting the body of a "shadow self" to survive a terrible experience. If the trauma is long-lasting, they may continue acting as the "shadow" for a long long time, to the point where it becomes unclear where the trauma self starts and the real self ends.

But the second half of that paragraph is really powerful as well. You are you: the things you are experiencing moment to moment, the decisions you make, those are your reality and all you need to focus on. It's easy to get lost in a dizzying haze of what-ifs and second-guesses, and we should instead focus on the present moment. We are who we are.

And, of course, that leads me to remembering Kurt Vonnegut's epigraph in Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Our shadow may not seem real, but actions we take as the shadow are our real actions: we can't hide behind the shadow as an excuse.

END SPOILERS

There's a lot more I'd like to write about but don't have much to say: some really great female characters in the second half of the book (an increasing strength of Murakami's over the years), terrific dreams, subdued humor.

I was surprised to have the novel end with an Afterword; as Murakami writes, he has never included an afterword before, but felt that this book deserved one. He lays out the timeline: he originally wrote "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" way back in 1980 as a novella, back when he was running a jazz bar in Tokyo and experimenting as a writer. It was really meaningful to him, but he felt there was something more to do with it. After the initial success of his first two books, he pulled out TCaIUW and built on it, with the idea of a "double feature" that plays two stories off each other before eventually merging, which eventually became Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Then, forty years later, he like most other people was quarantined at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. He had long wanted to revisit TCaIUW, and now as a mature author in his 70s he felt he could do it a justice that he couldn't in his 30s. So he went back to that story, crafting it again. He thought he was done after Part 1 but sat on it for a while, and realized that the story continued into Parts 2 and 3.

Knowing all that makes it even lovelier. I think of a jazz artist riffing on a familiar tune, of a classical composer varying a theme, of a master artist making the superior version of a painting. I want to re-read Hard-Boiled again and see just how similar they are - the main specific thing jumping out at me is that, at least in my memory, in the older book the dreams are contained in unicorn skulls, while in the newer book they are contained in eggs. I love the idea of the walled town as a sort of crossroads between multiple stories - it probably isn't that, but I like that idea! In any case, this has been a deeply satisfying book from one of the great masters.