When we first meet the nameless narrator of Haruki Murakami’s eerie new novel, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” he is a high school loner whose only friend is his cat. A chance meeting at a school awards ceremony brings him into the orbit of an equally isolated eccentric 16-year-old who can’t always distinguish her dreams from real life.
These two misfits strike up an ambiguous relationship, writing letters, talking endlessly, making out. The girl recounts her fantastic dreams, some of them erotic, and in no time at all our narrator falls calamitously in love: “I was so taken by you, I thought of nothing else when awake. You haunted my dreams, as well.”
The boy longs for his maybe-girlfriend, in the biblical way, and at first his inamorata seems 100 percent down. “I want to be yours,” she confesses. “Completely totally yours … in every way there is. Yours from top to bottom. I want to be one with you. I mean it.”
But then, in a wild addendum, the girl requests that they take it slow because she isn’t her real self; the person in front of the narrator is “only a stand-in,” a “wandering shadow.” “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.”
Someone else might have taken the hint, but our infatuated narrator ain’t about to let some corporeal confusion discourage him. He asks: “Can I go to that town … where the real you lives?”
For the rest of the summer the two talk endlessly about the strange town, with its sentient walls, unicorns, handless clocks and residents who lack shadows. Turns out the girl’s real self works at the town library, which is stocked not with books but with old dreams. If the boy ever reaches the town, reaches the real her, the girl promises he can become the town’s Dream Reader, who reads all the library’s dreams.
Only problem? Her real self won’t remember him, won’t remember them.
Boy wants girl, but girl, in a Scheherazade move, gives boy a creepy city instead.
Despite this, the narrator waits optimistically for things to change with the girl, and ultimately they do — but not the way he imagined or hoped. At the end of summer, the girl vanishes. Our narrator never learns what happened to her, and her disappearance, the amputation of their maybe-love, nearly breaks him.
He eventually recovers, attends college and spends the next decades working at a book distributor. Always alone, always thinking about the girl, unable to form other meaningful relationships.
And then, on his 45th birthday, he falls into a hole and finds the strange town, with its shifting walls and its unicorns and its dream library. He gives up his shadow and enters.
If you’ve read any Murakami, this will seem very familiar. All the author’s standards are here, from the classic Murakami male narrator — described perfectly by Hari Kunzru as “a listless, socially isolated guy whose interests tend to circle around music, books, home cooking and cats, and whose lack of anchor in the everyday world often precipitates a sort of slippage into a netherworld of ghosts and spirits” — to the apocalyptic disappearance and the reality-confusing shenanigans.
But “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” might be familiar for other reasons. This is the third time Murakami has told a version of this story — “The Town and Its Uncertain Walls” was one of his first published works, which he reshaped into “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” (A new edition, titled “End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” will appear in December.)
In a novel obsessed with hauntings — whether it be the lost girl or the affable ghost that appears later in the novel — it is perhaps fitting that the book itself is haunted by its earlier iterations. Ghost stories are, after all, a genre of repetition, a genre of unfinished business, to borrow from Rushdie.
Like the characters in the books, divided between their real selves and their fading shadows, I found myself divided as a reader, both inside “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” and outside. My shadow self couldn’t shake the sense that Murakami has told this story better elsewhere, or that the novel’s obsessive focus on the narrator’s aimless woes didn’t do its characterization, world-building or psychological depth any favors. It’s as though the novel itself is a melancholic ghost, drained of experiential matter, and there were moments in the reading when I thought the text was trying to turn me into a ghost, detached from feeling, from materiality, from life.
At the same time, my real self was delighted by the novel’s uncanny shell games, by its Murakami voice, which (in contrast to the often anhedonic characters) is so ghostbustingly alive. I was moved by his portrait of impossible loss, how it can carve within us a Stygian underworld to which we are always being summoned. I even interpreted Murakami’s stinting on fictional norms as an attempt to more directly represent the self-exiling quality of melancholic grief.
We often hear talk of “late style,” when great artists, in the final lap of their careers, acquire a “new idiom,” according to Edward Said, that either exudes “a renewed, almost youthful creativity and power,” or produces works of “intransigence, difficulty and contradiction” that eschew “harmony and resolution.”
Perhaps we are witnessing something approaching late style in the stubborn refusal of Murakami, who is 75, to relinquish his easy-to-caricature Murakami man and plot — and his intransigent, difficult and contradictory devotion to unfinished business.
James Berger observed that “the apocalyptic writer writes as his own ghost.” One wonders whether the ever apocalyptic Murakami, after all these spectral repetitions, is any closer to writing as his own.
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