Haruki Murakami’s new, magical novel has everything: the Beatles, jazz, cats, disappearing women

“A legend is an attempt to explain the inexplicable; bound to end in the inexplicable,” wrote Franz Kafka. What’s true for legends is true of Haruki Murakami’s stories, which often draw comparisons to Kafka’s. In Murakami’s 15th novel, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” just published with an English translation by Philip Gabriel, what’s inexplicable is love — the ways it binds and cleaves.
The novel — written during the global pandemic — opens with a dreamy sequence in which two teenagers traipse along a shallow river, wet blades of grass clinging to their calves like “wonderful green punctuation marks.” As the boy and the girl sit down on the riverbank, the boy has the feeling of “thousands of invisible threads” finely tying the girl’s body to his heart. But the girl is far away, both literally and figuratively. She chooses this moment to reveal that her real self lives in a distant town surrounded by high walls. The self there beside the boy is only her shadow. Several months later, even this shadow disappears.
Disappearing women are a hallmark of Murakami’s work. So are the Beatles, jazz, cats, precocious boys — all of which are in this book, too. Another hallmark is Murakami’s distinctive use of the surreal. The titular town is invented by the young girl, and yet it turns out to be as real as our world, running alongside ours in eerie parallel.
One day, several decades after the girl’s disappearance, the narrator falls into a hole and wakes up in this alternate world, just outside the walls of the town. After having his shadow removed and his eyes wounded, he’s permitted to enter and work as the town’s Dream Reader, in a bookless library where he finds the girl again — mysteriously unaged.
Murakami’s unique blend of real and surreal has made him an international literary sensation, a genuinely popular author who wins prestigious awards and gets mentioned in association with the Nobel Prize for Literature. His works have been turned into award-winning movies, like “Burning” (2018) and “Drive My Car” (2021).
But popularity breeds suspicion, and Murakami has his detractors, too. A critical essay in the New York Review of Books from 2014 explained Murakami’s approach this way: “an essentially realist story… (is) made intriguing not through a close-up presentation of the characters and their interaction, but by running them alongside mysteriously symbolic tales that invite elaborate interpretations. Readers are reassured that everything is extremely meaningful, if only we could understand it.”
Uncharitable as it may be, that description maps onto Murakami’s latest effort pretty neatly. “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” is teeming with mysterious symbolism: a town that seems to live from the annual sacrifice of unicorns, a clocktower with an armless clock, a woman who disappears (another one!) leaving only two long scallions — “white, thick, splendid scallions” — on her side of the bed. And, of course, the city itself (referred to as a “town” everywhere but in the title) with its uncertain walls.
Each of these images seems to beg for interpretation, sometimes explicitly, as when the scallions are described by the woman’s husband as “unmistakably, some kind of message for him.” And yet one can get stuck wondering whether these symbols really point to any deeper meaning or whether their value isn’t primarily aesthetic, like carefully curated found objects in a quirky coffee shop (or a jazz club, one of which Murakami ran before becoming a novelist).
There’s another possibility, though. In one of Murakami’s most beloved novels, 1994’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” the protagonist declares that “the best way to think about reality is to get as far away from it as possible.” And Murakami is at his best when his flights from the world as we know it serve this purpose, which is to say when the zany, supernatural elements have the effect of exaggerating and drawing our attention back to the inexplicable dimensions of everyday life: falling in love, growing old, being alone.
In an episode in his latest novel that feels like an apology for his own approach, Murakami has two characters discuss Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez — whose work is sometimes described, like Murakami’s own, as magical realism. One character argues that Márquez is not trying to pioneer a new style but is simply recording the world he inhabits, in which “the real and the unreal are equivalent.” “And that’s what I like about his novels,” she concludes. That is surely what many of Murakami’s admirers like about his novels, too.
Some, though, will be most taken with the simplicity of his prose. For long stretches, it pours over the reader like the pleasant patter of ordinary conversation, and then, suddenly, it veers gracefully into passages of psalm-like poetry: “At times my heart was a young rabbit gamboling about a spring meadow, at times a bird freely flitting off in the sky.” With such clean and buoyant writing, it’s perhaps not surprising that Murakami finds himself unsure about the line between what’s real and what he’s built with words.
Murakami has described the way he found his authorial voice as a process of subtracting from what he already knew and has suggested that his own originality lies in the “free and natural sensibility” that emerged from that process. The effect of this sensibility on his readers, he hopes, is to “open a window in their souls and let the fresh air in.”
This is a charming and worthwhile aim. But readers who want their souls plumbed, or even instructed, rather than aired out, may come away unsatisfied. (Some of the novel’s advice is disappointingly trite: “Just honestly follow the dictates of your heart. As long as you don’t lose sight of that, all will be well.”)
Still, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” offers a fun, fantastical trip into the inexplicable corners of the human heart. “The heart is what’s hard to comprehend, what’s hard to comprehend is the heart,” the narrator discovers. It’s hard to disagree.