Haruki Murakami, household name of Japanese literature, has released yet another masterpiece: The City and Its Uncertain Walls. The City is a reworking of a short story of the same name from 1980, which Murakami makes relatable using his stunning finesse of the magical realism genre.
Magical realism is a particularly popular genre that invites the idea that even in the regular places we frequent every day, in the tedium of everyday life, there may be something magical that could occur. At any moment we may be swept away to some unknown place or encounter some magical creatures. Murakami in particular thrives in this genre, taking us from the all to known landscape of modern Tokyo and the sprawling Japanese countryside to the dreary unnamed town where part of the story takes place, and from the ordinary office workers of the Japanese capital to the magical unicorns of the unnamed city.
The three-part story follows an unnamed narrator as he navigates through life. As a teen, he meets a girl and falls in love, and then suddenly she disappears. When we revisit him in his 40s, he has never gotten over her, and is unable to live a satisfying romantic life. Nor are the other aspects of his life fulfilling, until, one random day he wakes up at the bottom of a hole, outside the walls of a town that the girl had told him about when they were young. She had told him that the girl he was meeting was the mere “shadow” of her. The real her (as she remained unnamed) was inside of a walled-in town that people could go into only when they had parted with their shadows.
The first part of the book jumps between the narrator’s teenage infatuation and the time he spends in the town encountering the “real” girl that he had fallen in love with at 17. Yet by the end, his shadow, now a separate entity, has convinced him to escape. At the last second he chooses not to — his shadow running away from the town on its own. In the second part of the novel we encounter the narrator again (through his shadow) as he upends his life based off of a dream that he has had. He moves inland and starts working as a head librarian. Here he encounters an eccentric old man with a secret, a young savant boy who loves to wear his Yellow Submarine parka, and a young coffee shop owner who struggles with love. The third and final part seeks to explore the connections all of these storylines have together.
In this work Murakami often makes it hard to understand what is and isn’t reality. Is the narrator in Tokyo the real one? Or his shadow? Are we to believe that there are actual ghosts in small towns and little children are spirited away by pure will? In this sense Murakami makes us question how much of what is around us is real and how much is imagined, not remembered properly or simply impossible. When he bends the lines of reality and imagination, as an author he creates a world where we too are forced to question — is there a second version of us in a walled in town while we are here, mere shadows of the real us? What do we know about ourselves and what do we not?
The story centers around, though doesn’t always take place in, the walled-in town that houses the “real” version of the girl with whom the narrator had fallen in love. When the plotline doesn’t take place there, it is the main topic of thought or discussion amongst the characters. It is a place of few people, guarded by a fearsome gate-keeper and the home of unicorns and men alike. The most fascinating part of the town is the fact that the walls can move, change and adjust, as if it has its own consciousness and will. Murakami never confirms how this works and the speculation is that there is some greater will that drives it. The town itself is remnant of a thought police type of state where dreams — the very embodiment of emotions — are bottled up. People barely talk or interact other than to serve their purpose in society, however, the town itself does provide an important function. The narrator goes there at a moment when he most feels unsatisfied with his life and feels a thrill at being needed by the residents of the town as the Dream Reader. At times it feels as though the town functions as the main character, alive both in its physical form and in the minds of the living characters.
Murakami, as always, brilliantly interlays the fantastical and the real in his new novel. He strings us along into a world replete with unique characters and incredible settings. His greatest feat with this novel is not just the writing and the plot but also the main message it conveys. The novel at each turn shows how the human will is unconquerable. When we believe in something, when we have faith, anything is possible, and that is when magical things can happen. Throughout the book this is proven again and again, especially at the very end when the narrator’s faith is what drives the story to its conclusion. One of the most important quotes from the book — though I do not want to spoil the context — comes at this point when the narrator is told that “as long as your heart wishes it, it will happen.” In a book full of the most imaginative creations, Murakami leaves us with the most mundane but possibly the most important message — that which we believe in can and will come true.
Lusine Boyadzhyan is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at [email protected].