I still haven't read his last big novel, Killing Commendatore, so I can't speak to that. But, in the past decade, he's had a couple of collections of mostly-literary short stories, Men Without Women and First Person Singular. He's done some odd little non-fiction things, Murakami T and Novelist As a Vocation. And, possibly relevant to this book, the even-quirkier-than-usual novella The Strange Library.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is his most recent novel; he was writing it during the pandemic. It was published in Japanese in 2023 and in English, translated by Philip Gabriel, in November of 2024. It is an expansion or alternate version of an early Murakami novella of almost the same title - the novella has a comma after "City" - and somewhat related to the early Murakami novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which was a different reworking of that novella.
And it's a disappointing book. Inherently so, since it sets off telling one story, and abandons that entirely. I don't want to completely spoil the ending, but the ending does not answer any of the major questions raised by the opening or resolve the major relationship detailed there. Some books circle, some spiral - this one wanders, sometimes seeming aimless as it goes over here for a while, then back over there again, then off to another place.
It also made me very salty about a fantasy trope I've seen several times before, turning me super-literal as I read. You see, there are people in this book who do not have shadows. All very quirky and mysterious, yes. But how does that work? Does light just not illuminate the fronts of these people? Are their faces always dark, because the light wraps around them to shine just as brightly behind them?
It annoyed me because a shadow is not, despite fantasy thinking, a thing. A shadow is an absence, a place where a light doesn't shine because something is in its way. For a shadow not to be there, the thing that casts the shadow has to also not be there, or otherwise be made transparent to light.
Yes, I know it's a metaphor - a tedious, dull, obvious one, which we've all seen a thousand times - but it's a stupid metaphor that doesn't match anything about how the world actually works, and it physically pains me to see it running out at length in fine prose by a writer I otherwise respect.
Anyway, The City opens archly, with an unnamed boy and an unnamed girl in an unnamed region of Japan in an unnamed time some time in the past few decades. They meet as winners of a a school contest, date for about a year without getting physical, and then the girl stops responding to the boy's letters.
Spoiler alert: the actual, live girl never shows up again in the novel. Not once. Not at all. We never learn what she did, where she lived, what happened to her. The boy is obsessed with her for the rest of his life, but that's entirely about him, in that very Murakamian male-narrator way.
The girl explains a fantasy idea she has, and that she believes. She is not a real person; she is the shadow of someone else. The real her lives in an unnamed town surrounded by an ancient, unbreakable wall, somewhere not directly reachable from the normal physical world. Everyone in that town lacks shadows.
The boy comes to believe in this town, too. The title calls it a "city," but the book always refers to it as a "town." I don't know if that is meant to be significant. It also seems like a small town, one contracting and dying slowly over time, partially since it, by definition, has no connection to any other place. I also don't think Murakami meant the fact that this town is slowly dying to be meaningful; I'm not sure he realized he described it as dying, frankly.
Most of the people in the town do things the narrator doesn't care about, presumably agriculture or something, though people in this town also don't eat very much. But the girl - or the real version of the girl - works as the librarian there. And the boy somehow, many years later, finds himself at the gates of this town. He has his shadow cut away by the Gatekeeper, and moves into the town to work as the Dream Reader in that library.
To explain a bit more: the girl in the town is the same age as she was when the boy met her, as if she never changed. It's possibly no one in the town changes, but Murakami doesn't make that clear - and he does make it clear that the town has been shrinking in scope and population for a long time. So maybe people stay the same age, but sometimes suddenly die or disappear? The girl doesn't know the boy; she's the other version - even less does she know the middle-aged man he grew into. But her job is to keep the library, a big building filled with egg-like objects. And his job is to fondle those objects, which are Dreams, and then describe the dreams they embody, so they work together for an unspecified time.
But his severed shadow, which is living in what sounds like a paddock just outside the town, is dying, in a very slow, vague Ali MacGraw-kind of way. And it pushes the narrator to reconnect the two of them - which is supposedly impossible, a breach of the agreement he made when he came to the town - so they can return to the real world.
The narrator eventually agrees, and the two go to a deep dark and very symbolic pool in a disused corner of the town, where the narrator then suddenly balks at leaving. But the rules change yet again, and the shadow can now leave on its own and the narrator will stay behind.
But instead the narrator - or a version of him; it's not clear how he or we could be sure he's the only one - finds himself back in his old life in the real world, with a shadow that doesn't talk back or have an independent existence.
By the way, at this point we're only about halfway through the novel; there's a lot of semi-aimless Murakamian conversations full of people repeating phrases back to each other and vaguely philosophical Thoughts About Stuff both before and after here.
The narrator decides to find a job in a random library somewhere in the countryside, because he liked the Dream Reader gig. Because this is a Murakami novel, that random change of career for no particular reason does actually work, and he finds himself the new head librarian of the town of Z*, somewhere very rural and mountainous. The previous head librarian, who he does not realize for quite some time is already dead, gives him advice and guidance.
We get a lot of day-to-day life in Z* and day-to-day running of a small library and day-to-day chatting with a dead guy, and some day-to-day maybe-sorta flirtation of the narrator with a café owner who could become a love interest, for quite a long time, while what we thought was our plot disappears over the horizon. Eventually, a teen everyone calls Yellow Submarine Boy, after a "parka" he always wears - it sounds more like a sweatshirt or hoodie, since it's worn under a coat and needs to be washed semi-regularly, but anyway - rises up in the narrative, with a sheaf of vaguely autist behaviors, and, after even longer, learns about the walled town from our narrator.
Yellow Submarine Boy declares that he and the narrator are the same person, and that they need to merge and go back to the walled town so they can be the Dream Reader. Because this is a Murakami novel, this is actually true, and happens.
In the short last section, Yellow Submarine Boy and the narrator do live in the town again, do perform brilliantly at dream reading, which still seems as pointless and unconnected to anything else as it ever did, and then, very quickly, separate once again at the very end of the book.
At the very end, either Yellow Submarine Boy kicks the narrator out of his own life and purpose and the narrator dies, or the narrator goes back to the real world yet again for another period of tedious living that Murakami will not describe for us, or maybe something transcendent happens that Murakami will also not describe. Then we get an afterword, with Murakami explaining the various lives of this story, and how he wrote this one. Since he is a Big Name Bestselling Author, he doesn't mention anyone pointing out that this novel doesn't actually resolve the situation it sets up at the beginning, or answer any questions about the girl, which the narrator spends the entire book thinking about and obsessing on.
The City, like a lot of Murakami's work, runs largely on vibes. If those vibes connect with you, you will enjoy it. If, like me, they seem arbitrary and capricious where they actually make sense in the first place, you will be annoyed by the plot and ending even if you enjoy the language and writing. Keep that in mind if you consider reading it.
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