The most frustrating thing a writer can do to a reader is tell them, through so many words, that their reader is witless. Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls doesn’t let the reader serve themselves. It ties them to a spot and washes, peels, and stuffs sustenance right to their mouth. They can’t – and don’t – have to move so much as a finger. Entering the novel is like walking into a theme park designed after Murakami’s oeuvre, complete with a joyride that caricatures a plot, with teeny-tiny subplots that deflect from the larger premise of an isolated boy, now man, who fell in love with a girl who quite literally vanished. She didn’t even leave a note.
A city of words
Murakami’s unnamed narrator enters limbo after losing touch with his girlfriend, going through the motions of life, sequestering himself in the world of books. When they meet after their first encounter in an essay writing competition, she asks him to wait till she is ready to let him have “all of [her]” and also warns him that she is not the “real” her. She’s a shadow that the real her had to leave behind to enter the city with the walls, a city unlike the “real” world. (“My real self – the real me – is in a town far away, living a completely different life. A town surrounded by a high wall that doesn’t have a name.”)
Many of their conversations are built around this city, composing what it would be. They manifest a sturdy and strict Gatekeeper, unicorns that shrivel and die during the harsh winters, and build a city with just their words – its titular walls so personalised to each inhabitant’s perception that no one living there, and possibly not even a decent cartographer, can accurately map it.
This town becomes the narrator’s reality when he’s mysteriously whisked into it on his 45th birthday. At the town’s gate, his shadow is separated from him, with a prognosis of only a few days’ survival, as the shadow cannot exist without the person it reflects. (The novel rather carelessly dismisses the narrator’s girlfriend and her shadow self as an anomaly.) He becomes the Dream Reader of the town’s library where, instead of books, the stacks are filled with old dreams stored in dusty, kidney-shaped devices that he must read after warming them in his palms.
The librarian, his girlfriend inexplicably stunted at the age he last saw her, routinely opens and closes the library and makes him thick herbal tea to aid his work, sometimes even spoiling him with an apple dessert – perhaps the only luxury in a town where the inhabitants survive on meagre, infrequent meals, wearing clothes that appear to the narrator to be hand-me-downs. No one, except the narrator (a newcomer), seems to remember anything from their lives in the other reality; the inhabitants have no concept of indulgence, no forte for desire.
Without explanation, the narrator is pulled back into his real life. He quits his job and moves to a remote town to become head librarian in a privately owned library. There, he encounters more apparitions and a boy with savant syndrome who can finally map the other town, eventually disappearing into nothingness, leaving behind a shell of his “real” self – possibly, as the book eventually confirms, to journey to that other town. In this new/old town, the narrator becomes entangled with a woman who also, though not explicitly stated, asks him to wait. (Such a direct request, given their age, might have seemed too sentimental.) Like his first girlfriend, she is unable to have sex. His life, and the reader’s experience of the novel, becomes one of tiresome déjà vu.
A pre-packaged dream
Murakami gives you no hope of reading his novel on your own, handholding the reader as the metaphors abound, his narrator a character who unwraps every curiosity the writer has ushered in, the reader a passive recipient of meaning-making. The shadows of the imagined town’s inhabitants are stripped so they don’t remember their past lives, the clock tower in town doesn’t have hands so time isn’t a concept in the town, and the “Dream Reader” reads the inhabitant’s dreams so that emotions that might disrupt the town’s fragility don’t escape and penetrate the fragility of its order.
“I think old dreams are like echoes of the minds left behind by real people, people who’ve been banished from the town in order for it to exist. Real people are driven out, but it’s never completely perfect, there’s always something left behind. Those remnants of the mind are gathered together and tightly locked away in special receptacles called old dreams”.
Murakami slips in theories for these oddities into the pockets where usually a reader will intervene, wringing the metaphors dry. The novel is perpetually non-committal but also trance-like, like you’re being kept on edge by someone vacillating between the desire for you and self-absorption. The reader has no in or out, but I suspect I’d have left the book half-read if it weren’t a Murakami.
I must admit I felt like a product being sold a pre-packaged dream. Less like a reader and more like a subject in one of Murukami’s experiments, my reactions were anticipated and controlled, my reaction compromised – I knew the writer had bolted me onto the chair, and shown me all his instruments. In ticking off boxes on a Murakami bingo card – quirky characters, dreamlike sequences, melancholic atmosphere – the novel manufactures an experience where each chapter delivers a dopamine hit, exactly the kind that accompanies watching an Instagram reel. Every chapter begins on the last sentence of the previous chapter; the repetition is like a recap of the last episode, and almost every chapter ends on a cliffhanger to a point where you begin to expect those.
I couldn’t buy what Murakami was trying to sell: a reproach of the shackles we place on language and the realities it constructs, and of the desire to understand a thing completely and absolutely. To couch this clear ambition of the novel in language that explains itself, assuaging the modern reader’s desperate need for indisputable understanding, is a counter-intuitive strategy.
While the novel recognises that we’re a society of narratives, it forgets that we like stories precisely because they’re not like the digestible content that impedes the most prized possession of our intellects: our capacity to imagine. In the novel, a literal-minded character, the boy with computer-like intelligence, wants to go to the town, which is averse to socialisation, because he believes he can be understood there. Even if not understood, he wouldn’t be isolated, because everyone else would be as well. (And don’t we all sometimes conflate being understood as being the same as the person on the other end?) The fatigue that shadows you after an hour spent scrolling through Instagram reels fell squarely on my head after I completed The City and Its Uncertain Walls. I was bored at many points, but I couldn’t help turning the pages. How anachronistic for Murakami.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, Penguin Random House.
