Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls feels like a book written late in a writer’s life, not because it is tired, but because it is saturated with old obsessions revisited from a different vantage point. The novel returns to the “walled town” first imagined in his early career and expands that fragment into a sustained meditation on reality, identity, time, and how a single teenage love can mark a life so deeply that everything thereafter is, in some sense, an echo. It is recognisably Murakami: lonely men, mysterious girls, shadow worlds, libraries, musical references, unhurried pacing. Yet there is also a new tenderness, a sense that the author is taking stock of the motifs that have followed him for decades and asking what they finally amount to.
At the centre is the image that gives the book its title. A city ringed by a wall, existing half as dream, half as metaphysical plane, becomes the organising metaphor for a divided self. The teenage girl tells the seventeen-year-old narrator, “The real me lives there, in that town surrounded by a wall,” and later insists that “the me here with you now isn’t the real me. It’s only a stand-in. Like a wandering shadow.” The boy accepts this fantastic claim less because he understands it and more because first love has the force of revelation. Together, they construct the city through long summer conversations. Years later, the adult narrator discovers that imagination was not mere fancy. The city exists, and entry requires a radical sacrifice: to cross the gate, one must surrender one’s shadow.
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Murakami develops the city as both a metaphysical space and a psychological map. Within its walls, people have “no shadows”; the protagonist learns that “when I came to this town, I had to leave my shadow with the Gatekeeper at the entrance.” The Gatekeeper’s calm statement that the town was not made by anyone, that “It was always here, from the very beginning,” suggests that the city is less a constructed utopia and more a primal layer of the self. Yet the novel never lets this symbol settle. At one point, a character questions whether the girl in the city is the real one or the shadow, reminding the narrator, “You think what’s in the outside world is the girl’s shadow and the real girl is here in this town. But is that true? It might be the opposite.” The wall itself is “entirely uncertain,” a boundary whose texture, shape, and person-specific interpretation vary with context. Like some living being.” This uncertainty is central to the novel. Murakami refuses to tell us which side is real. Instead, he lets the reader inhabit the ambiguity.
Time within the city obeys its own rules. One of the most striking images is that of the clock tower without hands: “There’s a tall clock tower in the square, but the clock doesn’t have any hands.” Time “exists here. It just has no meaning. Which in the end amounts to the same thing.” Time without meaning is a good description of grief, of lives stuck at the moment of loss. The narrator’s life in the external world is also frozen in summer, when the girl disappears. He completes his studies, obtains employment, and navigates adult routines, yet inwardly, he never truly moves on. In this sense, the city is the frozen heart of his experience, the place where that moment has been preserved, removed from chronological flow, while his shadow drifts in a world where clocks still tick.
The library inside the city gives this timelessness a purpose. Here, the protagonist becomes a Dream Reader. “You’ll become a Dream Reader,” he is told, “as if revealing a crucial secret.” His task is to read “old dreams collected on the shelves of the library,” contained in strange skull-like objects. He is told that a Dream Reader “doesn’t need to have his own dreams. All you need to do is read all the old dreams.” Murakami uses this conceit to explore memory and the afterimages of consciousness. The dreams are described as “echoes of the minds left behind by real people, people who’ve been banished from the town in order for it to exist.” The Dream Reader’s job is “to take those souls, or echoes of the heart, calm them, and eliminate them.” It is both archival and destructive work: memory is preserved only so that it can be soothed into oblivion.
This strange vocation resonates with the narrator’s life in the external world, where he becomes a librarian in a remote town, inheriting the role from Mr Koyasu, a ghostly predecessor. Whether in the city beyond the wall or in rural Japan, he is drawn to the work of tending to other people’s stories rather than fully living his own. That pattern aligns with Murakami’s recurring fascination with introverted men who serve as custodians of memory and meaning, often at the expense of decisive action.
Running through all of this is a painful love story. The novel opens with the intensity of first love; the girl tells him, “I want to be yours, completely, totally yours.” Then she vanishes. The narrator never recovers. Murakami places this wound at the centre of his metaphysical architecture. The lost girl is not merely a romantic interest but the key to the narrator’s sense of reality. One of the most poignant reflections in the book observes that “once you’ve tasted pure, unadulterated love, it’s like a part of your heart’s been irradiated, burned out, in a sense. Particularly when that love, for whatever reason, is suddenly severed.” What follows is not a simple story of a man who cannot let go. It is a study of what happens when one formative experience defines the coordinates of a whole life. The walled city is, among other things, the crystallisation of that summer and the girl’s promise that she will be waiting there, even if “when I do meet you in that town, I won’t remember anything about you.”
Later relationships echo this initial loss. The divorced woman who runs the coffee shop and tells him, “My heart and my body are apart from each other. In slightly different places,” mirrors the book’s broader concern with divided selves. She asks him to wait “until I’m ready,” acknowledging that “a lot of things take time.” Her struggle to align feeling and embodiment reflects, in a more grounded register, the novel’s metaphysical split between city and world, self and shadow. The boy in the Yellow Submarine hoodie, with his photographic memory and social withdrawal, is another variation. For him, salvation lies in believing “in the existence of your other self,” which he calls his “lifeline.” This language echoes the way the narrator’s own life has been shaped by his conviction that, somewhere, behind a wall, an essential part of himself and of the girl continues to exist.
The notion of an “other self” runs throughout the novel, taken to literal form in the figure of the shadow the protagonist leaves with the Gatekeeper. The shadow becomes an independent consciousness that suffers, rebels, and eventually leaves the city. At one point, the protagonist describes himself as “a person who has lost his shadow. I do not have a shadow. I’m as dead as a cold iron nail.” It is a blunt statement of spiritual numbness. The man who returns from the city may function in the world, but he feels hollowed out.
In contrast, Mr Koyasu, the librarian whose ghost guides him, has become a different kind of “other self,” someone who continues his mission after death and now chooses the narrator as successor precisely because the narrator, too, has seen the city. The boy in the hoodie, who longs to enter the city and ultimately fuses with the narrator’s body there, becomes yet another internal double. Murakami multiplies these pairings: shadow, ghost, boy, girl, without memory. Every significant figure is some kind of other self, an aspect of the protagonist’s divided consciousness, yet they remain convincing as separate characters.
Formally, the novel is expansive and patient. It moves in three large arcs: teenage love and the imagined city, the sojourn inside the walled town as Dream Reader, and the adult librarian’s life in the mountain town. The structure allows Murakami to set up echoes across decades. The early conversations about the city return in more complex form when the narrator actually crosses its walls. The simple teenage promise becomes an elaborate metaphysical puzzle. This recursive movement reinforces the idea of cyclical time that many reviewers have noted. Rather than a linear progression, the book feels like a set of overlapping circles, each pass taking the protagonist slightly deeper into his own story.
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Readers who love Murakami for his surreal textures and emotional ambiguity will find plenty to engage with here. The city and its walls themselves are classic Murakami devices: concrete enough to picture, abstract enough to carry multiple meanings. The library scenes recall Kafka on the Shore and, further back, the “End of the World” sections of Hard-Boiled Wonderland. The lonely routines of the mountain town, the quiet meals, the small talk in the coffee shop, all feel familiar. For some, this recurrence will feel like a mature distillation, a late work in which motifs ripen. For others, it may suggest repetition. The charge that Murakami is “stuck on repeat” is not new, and this novel provides material for both his critics and his admirers.
What feels new is not the material but the stance. There is a self-awareness in the way the book handles its own images. The very idea of “uncertain walls” implies a refusal to settle questions that earlier novels at least gestured toward resolving. Here, reality and dream remain intertwined even at the end. The narrator’s final choices, his continuing ties to the city, and his partial reconciliation with love and loss all suggest acceptance more than explanation. He no longer seeks to break the wall or to declare one side real and the other an illusion. Instead, he learns to live with the fact that his inner and outer worlds will always inform each other.
As a reading experience, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is slow, reflective, and more about mood than plot. It asks the reader to surrender to its rhythm, much like listening to a piece of music where variations on a theme matter more than forward drive. It will not convert those who find Murakami’s style too meandering. Yet for readers attuned to his quiet frequencies, it offers a rich, melancholic journey into the question that has haunted his work from the beginning: what happens when a part of the self disappears behind a wall, and what kind of life remains possible for the person who stays outside with only a shadow of what he once was.
The novel’s achievement lies in how fully it embodies its own metaphor. The city, the wall, the shadow, the ghosts, the boy in the yellow hoodie, the coffee-shop owner whose heart and body are “in slightly different places” all crystallise into a single insight: identity is not a fixed core that can be found once and for all. It is a shifting conversation between different selves, across time, across realities, across the thresholds we cross and the ones we refuse. Murakami gives that conversation a landscape, a library, a clock without hands, and invites us to walk those streets alongside his narrator, unsure of where one world ends and the other begins, yet oddly comforted by the uncertainty.
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Review by Ashish for Indian Book Critics
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