Book review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Haruki Murakami’s latest novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls opens with a poetic, dreamlike memory of the narrator lying beneath a twilight sky with his first love. He describes “the radiant feelings of a seventeen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old on the grass of a riverbank.” This pristine moment of love—and intensity—is one that the unnamed narrator has been unable to match nearly thirty years later.
Given the novel’s vivid, atmospheric start, Murakami establishes a weighty promise: that the rest will uphold or exceed this strength. Anything less would be noticeable. But what begins as a poignant meditation on love, time, and identity unravels into an overwritten—and, frankly, boring—work with unconvincing plot lines, half-baked characters, and thematic incoherence. The latter parts felt tacked on, which is surprising for Murakami’s fifteenth novel.
Revisiting an unfinished work
Murakami first published the core of The City and Its Uncertain Walls in 1980 as a novella in a Japanese literary magazine, Bungakukai. He came to regret this decision, feeling the story was incomplete. Four decades later, he reworked it into a full-length novel told in three parts, with parallel, alternating narratives that eventually converge—an approach Murakami admits is “pretty haphazard” in the novel’s afterword.
At the center of this reimagined story is a middle-aged Japanese man living a lonely, unfulfilling life in Tokyo. The narrator finds himself absorbed in the past—in the imaginary city he and his teenage girlfriend dreamed about before she vanished, a place where their “real” selves exist. In the narrator’s pursuit of the imaginary city, the reader is transported to a fantastical place where time doesn’t exist, people lack shadows, and there’s a library that holds dreams instead of books.
These imaginative passages are among the novel’s most captivating, where Murakami’s surrealism is purposeful rather than decorative. As the line between reality and the imaginary blurs, the novel raises the question of which one holds our true identity—where can we be ourselves when we often feel like a shadow or outline of who we are?
Reality vs. the imaginary city
The City and Its Uncertain Walls sits comfortably in the genre of magical realism, and we expect to suspend our disbelief as the real and unreal comingle. First, the narrator’s visits to the imaginary city clearly happen only in his mind—when he loses consciousness after a head injury or dreams about the city. As the novel progresses, his external life begins to mirror the one in the imaginary city: he moves to the countryside, becomes the head librarian of the local library, and the boundary between reality and the invented dissolves.
Oddly enough, it isn’t the bizarre details that are most difficult to accept, but the mundane. Throughout the novel, the narrator describes various memories of his teenage girlfriend, often noting what she wore—from the “matching navy blue pleated skirt” to her “white blouse with a ribbon, white socks, and black slip on shoes.”
He even recalls their exact conversations:
“I remembered exactly what she told me that May morning. I was seventeen then. I can still clearly hear her voice, her breathing. ‘I want to be yours,’ the girl said. ‘In every way there is. Yours from top to bottom. I want to be one with you. I mean it’.”
It’s hard to believe a teenage boy would pay close attention to a girl’s clothing, let alone remember the details nearly thirty years later, especially when they weren’t particularly noteworthy (navy skirt, white blouse). It’s even harder to believe he can recall her response verbatim, barring a photographic memory, old journal entries, or letters—none of which are applicable here.
***
For a brief interlude…check out these articles for more insights + subscribe to my newsletter:
The unreliability of memory
Memory is not reliable. Especially over the course of three decades. While it’s likely that few of the narrator’s original memories are intact, Murakami repeats them word for word throughout the novel, a choice that makes the narrator’s memories seem less credible. The narrator’s memories are even unreliable by his own admission: “How much of what I remember was the truth, and how much was fiction?”
Unable to trust the narrator’s account, the reader is left to piece together the plausible and the imagined independently. While this may have been Murakami’s attempt to mirror the narrator’s confusion, it leaves the reader with more objections about reality than the invented.
Yet Murakami's fixation with this work is understandable. The novel's core holds a quiet story about our inherent desire for meaning, connection, simplicity, and the pain of unrequited loveve. Murakami’s prose is at its best when it’s lyrical yet restrained—wistful, melancholic, and capable of capturing emotion with simple imagery like, “The two of us sat there, side by side, on the riverbank of a nameless world.”
The problem with nostalgia
Unfortunately, what we often get is a hyper-romanticized “recollection” of the narrator’s former relationship. It was disappointing when Murakami's prose bled saccharine and cringeworthy, with lines like, “Once you’ve tasted pure, unadulterated love it’s like a part of your heart’s been irradiated, burned out in a sense.”
Is a man in his mid-forties really still suffering so intensely from a teenage relationship that lasted less than a year? Is his view of love, despite having subsequent relationships over the course of three decades, really this rudimentary? The narrator’s thoughts are better suited to a young adult in a coming-of-age story.
Likewise, the novel is filled with dramatized ruminations that are inconsistent with the narrator’s maturity level: “Nobody tells you where to go now. No one consoles you or encourages you ... You’re left utterly alone in a desolate land.” It’s unconvincing that a middle-aged man who’s lived alone for decades—with a stable job as a senior book distributor and an otherwise settled life in Tokyo—thinks this helplessly.
Another issue that could have been avoided with a younger narrator is the uncomfortable relationship dynamic. Taking a step back—or even glancing a few paragraphs down the page—it becomes apparent that the novel blurs nostalgia with inappropriate desire. In one scene, the narrator conflates his sexual desire for the woman he’s dating with that for his teenage girlfriend:
“I imagined her naked body, the feeling of holding that body close. The same as when I was seventeen, in the train on the way to see her and imagined taking her clothes off... I couldn’t separate the sexual desire I had back then from the desire I felt right now.”
While the novel prompts us to empathize with the narrator, its emotional resonance is undermined by the fact that he’s a man in his mid-forties fantasizing about his former sixteen-year-old girlfriend. What Murakami likely intended as a reflection on the persistence of love instead reads as a misguided fixation.
The narrator’s untrustworthy account
The City and Its Uncertain Walls strives to impart a larger message about love, identity, and happiness. This is evident from the start, when the narrator’s former girlfriend talks about escaping to an imaginary city where she can be her true self. But its construction makes it impossible to discern its intended meaning. If the reader believes the narrator’s account (which is suspect at best), the novel offers a grim outlook: some people are bound to be unhappy in this world, so they’re better served living in their imaginations.
Yet the implications of doing so are disastrous. When the narrator’s ex-girlfriend chose to live in the imaginary city and vanished without a word, she caused decades of yearning, sadness, and trust issues for the narrator. Time for him “had actually come to a halt” since she left.
If the reader decides not to trust the narrator’s opinions, Murakami puts forward one other character as a source of reason and objectivity: Mr. Koyasu, an eccentric, semi-omniscient head librarian in the countryside town. We’d expect Mr. Koyasu to ultimately advise people against living in the imaginary city. Yet, he echoes the narrator’s views that some people aren’t suited to “this world.”
Mr. Koyasu has other questionable beliefs. For example, he tells the narrator, “You came across your very best partner at an early stage in life.” The fact that this encourages an unhealthy message about love isn’t even the point here. Rather, this conclusion undermines our trust in Mr. Koyasu because the girl was the farthest thing from the narrator’s “very best partner.”
For starters, she left without saying goodbye and didn’t reciprocate the narrator's efforts, knowing the extent of his feelings. The girl also shared next to nothing about herself: the narrator “had almost no concrete information or objective facts, nothing I could state with certainty for sure.” Yet, he passes this off as romantic: “It occurred to me that maybe it was better to know nothing” because details get in the way of a person’s essence.
The couple was also insulated from the outside world; they never met at each other’s houses, never met each other’s families or friends. Yet again, the narrator justifies these habits as evidence of their intimacy: “We were satisfied with a world for just the two of us and didn’t want anyone else to be a part of our relationship.”
Romanticizing the past
The narrator’s greatest flaw is his failure to see the extent to which he romanticized the relationship—a realization that’s noticeably absent by the novel’s end. Instead, he concludes that love is just less great than he hoped. It’s “more diffuse, more sensible, wrapped in soft clothing, restrained by a certain wisdom and experience. Something to be grasped over a longer time frame.” Maybe this is true, but he got there the wrong way.
The point of imagination is to provide temporary moments of escape or to enrich life, not to replace or hinder it. The true imaginary element in the novel is the girl. She exists only as an idea, aggrandized by faulty memory and time. In reality, the narrator only met her in person a handful of times, knew little about her, and their encounters happened decades ago. All of this lends credence to what is perhaps the novel’s unintended message: humans have a tendency to romanticize the past.
At nearly 450 pages, we expect The City and Its Uncertain Walls to teach us a thing or two about love, identity, and the extent to which the real and imaginary can coexist. Instead, readers are left to their existing interpretations since the novel failed to raise new or trustworthy insights.
Ultimately, Murakami’s novel reads like the fragments of a dream he had but couldn’t quite capture; ironic, since it starts with several lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”—a poem Coleridge claimed came to him in a dream, one he was unable to recreate after being pulled away. We would be better served by reading the 150-page novella.
If you liked this post, check out these:
5 of the best philosophy-related books