Most artists have a handful of ideas or themes they keep returning to—reworking, reconsidering, or just obsessing over a set of key preoccupations. But it’s a rare novelist who writes a story early on, then rewrites the same story in midcareer, and finally again in his late maturity. That’s what Haruki Murakami has done with The City and Its Uncertain Walls, a retelling—or perhaps another telling is a better term—of a short piece of the same title that he wrote as a fledgling author, then later published as the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in 1985. The story has changed profoundly over the years—at least between Hard-Boiled Wonderland and this latest incarnation, since the author has chosen not to republish the earliest version—in ways that reflect Murakami’s own growth as a writer. This novel is Murakami in winter, a season that, while outwardly sere and quiet, often harbors secret reserves of hope and joy.
The premise he has returned to is this: An unnamed man exists both in the recognizably real world and in a walled town where nothing ever changes. The inhabitants of the town wear simple clothes and live “plain but perfectly adequate lives.” As a resident of the walled town, the narrator works at a library that archives not books but spherical objects containing “old dreams” that he is tasked with reading. Assisting him is a young woman, the librarian, with whom he falls in love. The clock tower in the center of the town has a face with no hands, and to live in the community, a person must agree to be severed from his shadow by the Gatekeeper, who prevents the uninitiated from entering and the shadowless residents from leaving.
Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page.
Thank you for your support.
In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, the narrator also lives in a near-future world in which a person’s mind can be partitioned to store encrypted data. (This concept seemed wildly trippy in 1985, but all too chillingly plausible at a time when one of Elon Musk’s most alarming projects involves implanting chips into human brains.) What the narrator eventually learns is that the walled town is a section of his unconscious that has been split off as an ultra-secure site. He also learns that his mind has been altered with a switch designed to turn everything off in 48 hours. He can stay in the real world and fight to survive, or he can repair to the walled town, otherwise known as the End of the World. However brief his existence in the real world, because time does not exist in the unconscious, he can stay there for an eternity with his beloved librarian, reading old dreams.
All science-fiction and detective elements—borrowings from Western pop culture that abound in Murakami’s earlier work—have been purged from The City and Its Uncertain Walls. This novel is instead meditative and melancholy, its mysteries less a matter of conspiracies than self-discovery. The walled town in this version of the story is the creation of the narrator and his first love, a girl he met in his late teens and who vanished from his life not long after. They dreamed it up during their idyllic time together, and somehow it became real. By the time he reaches his 40s, the narrator has a perfectly ordinary job working for a book distribution company, but one day he falls into a hole in the ground—dry wells and other subterranean cavities are a recurring Murakami motif—and finds himself in the walled town he once invented with his long-lost sweetheart. She had told him that the real her lived in the walled town, and that he could be with her there if he desired it enough.
Murakami has often been accused of solipsism, and it’s true that, like Hard-Boiled Wonderland, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is primarily a novel about selfhood, how we construct it and maintain it, often at the expense of our own happiness and the welfare of others. For some acute introverts, the narrator’s complaint of a “visceral sense that this reality isn’t a reality for me, and the deep sense of estrangement that it produced,” may sound like an accurate description of what it’s like to be around other people. Even the more sociable might see an appeal in the walled town, where a certain solid, semirural tranquility prevails and the cycle of seasons repeats itself with a soothing predictability. Whole political movements have been built on the longing for such old-fashioned continuity, after all.
To remain in the walled town, the narrator must agree to a violent separation from his shadow, who becomes a separate being living outside the city walls and slowly wasting away. This all sounds pretty Jungian, but the shadow seems to be merely another version of the narrator’s self, neither darker nor lighter, but certainly more amenable to adventure. The narrator describes his shadow as his “consciousness,” and admits: “The town will eventually swallow me. But even if that happens, I don’t care. As long as I’m here, I won’t be lonely. Because in this town I know what I should do, what I ought to do.” A version of his lost love does live there, and he’s able to see her every day, but she doesn’t remember him or their teenage romance. She seems, in fact, incapable of any strong emotion, like everyone else who lives in the walled town.
In both versions of this story, the shadow pleads with the narrator to leave the town, but the narrator is ambivalent. When he does in fact wind up back in the real world, with apparently no time passed, he quits his job on a whim and then, inspired by a dream, takes a new position as head librarian in small town in the mountains. His life there takes on a certain resemblance to his life in the walled town, but with the addition of several Murakamian elements: cats, a friendly ghost, jazz, meal prep, a peculiar boy wearing a Yellow Submarine–themed parka. This period takes up the middle and longest of The City and Its Uncertain Walls’’ three parts, and unlike Murakami’s other works, its approach is leisurely, textured, and much less plot-driven. The mountain town feels real and populated in a way that Murakami’s settings often don’t. The narrator’s life there may be an echo of his time in the walled town, but its differences will prove crucial to the novel’s denouement.
What is the walled town? A prison or a utopia? Life or death? The past or the future? While Hard-Boiled Wonderland seemed most intrigued by a neurotechnological explanation, in The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the town could just as easily represent the writer’s imagination, a place of apparent stasis containing in its library a repository of old but reusable dreams. A scientist built the walled town in Hard Boiled Wonderland, but in The City and Its Uncertain Walls, its creators are two kids in love, who summon it as a rejection of the world they’ve been given. The narrator comes to see it more clearly than any previous Murakami character has, and his deeper understanding appears to be Murakami’s own. Knowing that it has taken the novelist more than four decades to reach this destination only adds to the fulfillment of this final and very welcome arrival.
This post was originally published on here
