Isolation and alienation in the modern world have long been themes of the Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s fiction. So it is not surprising that Murakami, who has millions of readers globally thanks to books such as Norwegian Wood (1987) and The Wind -Up Bird Chronicle (1997), wrote his first novel in six years during the pandemic. Social distancing and hours to ruminate on one’s past and passions were predictably fertile ground for Murakami, 75.
It led him to rework a novella which he published in a magazine in 1980 and which now, in a much-expanded version, forms the basis for The City and Its Uncertain Walls . At 450-pages, it is an enveloping, magical realist story about an unnamed man who moves between contemporary Japan and an otherworldly city that is surrounded by a high wall. Now approaching middle-age, he is searching for his former girlfriend, his first love, who he met when he was 16.
“One day she vanished, without a word of farewell, without even a hint that she was leaving,” he recalls. “And I’ve never seen her since.” The novel is divided into three parts, the first of which takes place in the walled city, where the narrator moves through a closed-off society, encountering a gatekeeper, people whose bodies cast no shadows, unicorns with “lustrous yellow fur” and a library of dreams which stores images and stories that once swirled around individuals’ minds as they slept.
“It seemed as though, in the past, many more people had lived in thi.