Existential Burdens: Haruki Murakami’s ‘The City and Its Uncertain Walls’

“Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change and movement. Isn’t this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?”

It’s a question Haruki Murakami asks in the afterword to his latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls.

The Japanese author’s afterword reveals many things. Least of all – to me, at least – that the embryonic guise of The City and Its Uncertain Walls featured in the Japanese literary magazine, Bungakukai, in 1980.

While walls, worlds and shadows underpin much of Murakami’s latest intoxicating tale – again, without any prior knowledge – at the time of reading his fifteenth novel, and felt close to the 1985 game-changer, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The unicorn skulls which featured throughout the latter, perhaps deriving from The Gatekeeper’s quarry within the walls?

These loose threads equate to thought-provoking stuff. But then again, it’s Haruki Murakami, so why would we expect anything less? The moody, mending-bending atmospheres he conjures up, so hypnotic that even the most absurd situations feel like reality.

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Not only does Murakami pull from his earlier works on The City and Its Uncertain Walls, but recent ones, too. The highway portal in 1Q84 recalling similar visions that galvanise much of The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Again, is there a link? That truth, found in ceaseless movement?

It can be argued that Murakami has never explored liminality so overtly like he does throughout The City and Its Uncertain Walls. “A realm beyond your own logic and reason” as the nameless protagonist professes in one of the many fascinating snapshots throughout these 445 pages.

Another is the discussion that takes places in the library inside the walls where dream reading is undertaken. Those “Echoes of mind” where “real people” are banished from a place so it can still exist. The concept of the dream reader itself, interesting whereby a line could be drawn from these ideas to the many voiceless minds who have cultivated AI as we currently know it.

In this instance, Murakami pits the mind against body. Scouring the liminal space in a sequence of events that are so ambiguous and multi-faceted, it’s a struggle to ascertain which thread to latch onto.

That’s no criticism, either. Once again, Murakami pierces through, and he does it by engineering beautifully bizarre, genuinely off-kilter characters that possess the kind of traits where the world can only be viewed through a unique lens.

It’s essential Murakami; his characters positively untethered from any normalised aspects of the world, but still managing to function in it, gently exploring the possibilities beyond the mundane. It’s these explorations that take Murakami’s characters to a magical, surrealistic metropolis that no other writer has bettered.

Take Mr. Koyasu. Murakami has always carved out profound older characters, and Mr. Koyasu is up there with his best. “Once you’ve tasted pure, unadulterated love, it’s like a part of your heart’s been irradiated, burned out, in a sense. Particularly when that love, for whatever reason, is suddenly severed,” he explains to the nameless protagonist. It’s a passage that could have featured in Men Without Women.

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Here Murakami connects the dots from earlier in the novel; namely the permeations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, which are scented throughout the early parts of the story. It’s hardly surprising when Murakami’s characters begin quoting passages from it towards the end of The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Recounting Marquez’s work, Mr. Koyasu says, “In his stories, the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one.”

It’s perhaps the most poignant moment in this story. Where a person’s physical state occupies one world, while their memory crosspollinates between that world and another. It’s where the concept of liminality is blurred and baked into one, revealing a new dimension of surrealism.

It’s interesting, because the reception for The City and Its Uncertain Walls has been mixed. However, the further you dig, the more it’s revealed how much new ground Murakami explores here. Granted, themes of surrealism and magical realism have been tried and trusted hallmark cards within the Murakami canon, but it’s existentialism where Murakami really shines a light, tackling the very burdens of it. Where do we exist and who do with exist with?

These are the questions that Murakami asks with The City and Its Uncertain Walls. It’s quintessential Murakami and, even at times, likened to a psychedelic experience. But the aid of chemical refreshments isn’t required here. Murakami’s tales, more than enough to guide the mind to the same new corners he has explored. Where new possibilities arise, making the impossible actually seem possible. And with The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the gap between the two hasn’t been closer.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is out now via Harvill Secker. Purchase here.