By Bram Presser
FICTION
The City And Its Uncertain Walls
Haruki Murakami
Penguin $49.99
Shortly before the release of A Wild Sheep Chase, the gleefully madcap debut that shot him to instant stardom, Haruki Murakami published a novella in a Japanese literary magazine. It went mostly unnoticed and has been the subject of little discussion in the 40-plus years since. Now, at the tail end of a stellar career – one that has seen his name regularly bandied about for the Nobel Prize – Murakami has returned to that novella, expanded it substantially and lumped us with another hefty tome that might appeal to diehard fans but is otherwise just one more in a long line of recent disappointments.
That the first part of The City and Its Uncertain Walls stems from Murakami’s creative juvenilia is obvious. The thematic obsessions with duality, love and loneliness are already there. As are the flourishes of wonder. But the writing is so overwrought, the prose so purple, that I half expected Prince to come back from the dead to sing about it. It’s a strange juxtaposition; this conceptual precursor to one of my favourite Murakami novels, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, scribbled down by someone neck-deep in a barrel of adjectives.
If you can step over the “delicate silvery fish” and tune out the “cries of the invisible night birds”, though, there is much to like in this youthful stab at magical realism. An unnamed narrator recalls his first love. He is 17, his crush a year younger. As their feelings grow, she lets him in on a secret. The girl he has fallen for is, in fact, but a shadow. Her true self lives in a faraway town, surrounded by an impregnable, shape-shifting wall, its only entrance guarded by a fearsome gatekeeper. As chance would have it, an opportunity for him to pass through arises.The town library requires a new dream reader. And so, the young man sets off to find his love. He meets the gatekeeper who rips away his shadow and cuts his eyes, both requirements of entry. Love prevails for a short while, but all is not well in the town. His shadow is dying. Unicorns freeze to death in the fields. He decides to leave.
Had The City and Its Uncertain Walls ended there, it would have made for an enchanting piece of Murakami ephemera. Unfortunately, the book is just beginning. We meet the man again, now a 40-something loner, as he escapes Tokyo to become the head librarian in a small country town. He is completely unqualified for the job and fumbles through the day-to-day necessities, guided by his predecessor, Mr Koyasu, and the assistant librarian, Mrs Soeda. The only regular visitor to the library is a teenager in a Yellow Submarine parka who spends his days wolfing down books. There is little substance to these characters. They are expository vessels, opportunities for Murakami to wax lyrical – at length – on his favourite topics.
Murakami’s latest novel might be for diehard fans only.Credit: Nathan Bajar
Mr Koyasu, a ghost, lectures the narrator on the fundamental difference between the corporeal self and the soul. Mrs Soeda, described in classic Murakami fashion in terms of her body and sexual allure (she has “healthy-looking calves”), explains the history of the library and the tragic life and death of Mr Koyasu. Most problematic, however, is the teenager, who one day draws a map of the walled-in town of the narrator’s youth. He has “savant syndrome … like the character in the movie Rain Man”. Cringe. There’s a fine line between representation and exploitation. By leaning into tired tropes that reduce the boy to a narrative device that bridges the real and magical worlds, Murakami shows little insight into where that line might lie.
The writing is so overwrought, the prose so purple, that I half expected Prince to come back from the dead to sing about it.
As I trudged through its many sermons, I got the sense that The City and Its Uncertain Walls was a book deeply at odds with itself, unsure of what it wanted to be. There’s an awkward tilt at pandemic lit. And an Idiot’s Guide to Jazz. More than anything, it struck me as a hodgepodge of the literary titans who informed Murakami’s early sensibilities and the cultural trends that have bubbled up around him over the last four decades.
Not that he trusts in the intelligence of his readers to connect the dots. So, just to be sure, we get an entire primer on magical realism, including excerpts from Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. When the boy suddenly disappears, there is the repeated suggestion that he was “spirited away”, as if the multiple nods to animator Hayao Miyazaki weren’t obvious enough. And, in case the episode with the gatekeeper didn’t conjure Kafka’s Before the Law in the reader’s mind, Murakami has the girl in the dream library declare that she only existed for the narrator and now that he is leaving, she will disappear.
Add to it all the frankly undergraduate philosophical ruminations on the soul, love and the nature of reality, and I was left to wonder what – other than the boredom of pandemic lockdown and the self-confessed fear that he had run out of stories to tell – compelled Murakami to write it.
I suspect that in some parallel, magical universe, a relatively unknown Murakami has just published a delightful novella about a town with impregnable, shape-shifting walls, and a man who arrives there to become the resident dream-reader. Alas, here all we get is its bloated, if occasionally charming, shadow.
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