Haruki Murakami Archives

Cover image of "The City and Its Uncertain Walls" by Haruki Murakami

The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami (Translated by Philip Gabriel). Alfred A. Knopf (ISBN: 9780593801970) 2024.

Summary: A young couple falls in love until she disappears to a mysterious city of people without shadows.

A teenage boy meets a girl at a writing competition. They write and are drawn to each other, visiting and cuddling and longing for more. He loses his heart to her but she asks him to be patient, saying she wants to give herself wholly to him. And then she just disappears. But before this happened, she told him that her real self lived in a city with walls, unicorns, a clock tower without hands, and that in that city, she was the librarian. The girl he knew was a mere shadow of that girl.

Understandably, he longs to follow her to that city, but does not know how. He never marries and works in publishing. Then, one day when he is forty-five, he falls into a hole and finds himself outside the city with a wall. To enter, the Gatekeeper must remove his shadow, which will live separately. Then he must go through a painful eye treatment to fit him for his job. He will work with the girl at the library reading everything in its collection. Not books, but the dreams of past inhabitants of the city.

So, each day, he arrives, the girl makes a tea to help his eyes, and gives him egg-shaped dreams to hold and “read.” Then he walks her home along the river to the housing where she lives. But she doesn’t recognize him from their relationship outside the wall. However, his shadow interrupts this companionable routine. The shadow is dying and must return to the outside world. Finally, he is convinced, but turns back at the last minute while the shadow departs.

Yet we meet him next, not in the city but back at home. He has a shadow again. But he is dissatisfied with his life. He asks a friend to help him find a different job in a small town. He applies for a job as a director of a small library. After an interview with the founder and retiring director, Mr. Koyasu, he is hired despite his scant qualifications. Mr. Koyasu is unusual. He wears a distinctive beret and a skirt. But he drops by and mentors the man, including taking him to a secret room that is warmer in winter. Only later do we learn that Mr. Koyasu is dead. A shade if not a shadow!

He finds Koyasu’s grave and talks to him on his days off. And he meets a woman who owns a nearby coffee shop. It appears that, if not first love, then some kind of love might be possible. Except a boy turns up who reads at the library every day, and knowing your birthday, can tell you the day on which you were born. Apart from that, he doesn’t communicate. Yet he connects with the director. And one day he overhears him talking to Mr. Koyasu at the grave about the city…

Shadow and substance. What is real? Murakami gives us his own version of Socrates’ Cave. And do we not sometimes feel alien to our own world, and think there might be another where we are more at home? And yet the nameless narrator doesn’t find his real love in the city without shadows–nor in this one. We wonder if he will accept the possibility of love in front of him from the coffee shop owner. Apart from that relationship, one feels he is living a shadow existence, unconnected with others in the town.

This is the second Murakami novel I’ve read, and I find myself drawn to his narrative voice. It is both quiet and evocative without becoming overpowering. He draws the reader into the mental and emotional landscape of his main character. Then he throws enough surprises and twist in to keep it interesting and make you wonder where this is going.

Murakami adds a fascinating postscript. He first wrote this story as a novella forty years ago but never was satisfied with the ending. This work is a re-working as he finally found a way to complete the story. We learn he added parts two and three. I’ve not read the earlier work. I’d like to hear from Murakami fans who have read both this and the earlier novella. Do you think he succeeded?

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami. New York: Vintage International, 2002.

Summary: In two parallel plots Kafka tries to escape a curse and find his mother and sister (and himself) and Nakata tries to recover the part of him lost during a strange school outing incident in his youth.

This represents my first encounter with Murakami, one that left me strangely fascinated. I’ve not always found myself drawn to magical realism, but I could not put this down.

The story involves two connected plots, advanced in alternating chapters. The first follows the title character Kafka, a fifteen year old who runs aways from his father, the famous sculptor Koichi Tamura, to search for his mother and sister, who left when he was four. He makes his way to Takamatsu where he meets an accommodating young woman, Sakura, who shelters him when he awakens to find himself covered with blood and no memory of how it got there. His trek eventually takes him to a private library in a former wealthy home administered by Miss Saeki, who many years before had recorded Kafka on the Shore, remembering a young lover lost. He’s welcomed and protected, by Oshima, a transgender man. For a time he lives at the library, and then when in danger of being found by the police, who are seeking him as a material witness in the murder of his father, Oshima shelters him in a cabin deep in a forest in the Kochi Prefecture

The second plot involves Nakata, an aging man who as a child was part of a group of school children who fell unconscious during a school outing during the Second World War. The others recovered to lead normal lives. After several weeks of lying unconscious, Nakata awakened but couldn’t remember anything and could no longer read or write or learn how to do so. He’d led a quiet life, working in a kind of sheltered furniture workshop. He eventually received a government subsidy on which he lived alone. He had a unique ability to understand the language of cats and to find lost ones and restore them to his owners. On one such search, he encounters a sinister character, Johnnie Walker, who has been capturing and beheading cats to make a magic flute. To recover the cat he is seeking, Johnnie Walker tells Nakata that he must either kill Johnnie Walker or he will kill the cat. Nakata, utterly non-violent, eventually does so, returns the cat, and then flees. Hitchhiking, he meets up with Hoshino who takes him to Takamatsu, where they have a variety of strange adventures including an encounter with Colonel Sanders, who is a kind of spirit guide (or concept).

That raises one of the main ideas in the novel–the way spirits leave the body encountering others. Though Kafka has fled his father to evade a kind of Oedipal curse, Kafka’s bloody clothes episode and Nakata’s murder of Johnnie Walker, who turns out to be Koichi Tamura, occur at the same time. Miss Saeki visits the room where Kafka sleeps in the library each night as a fifteen year old girl looking at a painting, eventually having sex with him, as later Miss Saeki herself does.

As I mentioned, there is a kind of Oedipal curse going on with Kafka, murdering his father, and sleeping with both mother (Miss Saeki) and sister (Sakura, in a violent rape dream).

Meanwhile, Nakata is also on a quest of the kind that he knows it when he finds it, trying to the patience of Hoshino, who is also transformed by his time with the old man. He’s only had a thin shadow since the childhood incident. Likewise, Miss Saeki, always at her desk writing…and waiting.

Two people, Nakata and Miss Saeki, trying to find what was lost. Kafka, trying to find himself, in his lost mother and sister. And Oshima? What is his role? Perhaps as a wiser guide than Crow, the alter ego of Kafka (which in Czech means “crow” or “jackdaw”), who just tells him he has to be “the toughest fifteen-year-old in the world.” As the novel concluded, I found myself wondering, what of Oshima?

There is so much more, and I find myself with many questions like this one. It’s a book that invites multiple readings. As one may pick up from this review, there are scenes of violence, a vivid dream of a rape, and descriptions of sexual intimacies, so this may not be for everyone. None of it is gratuitous (well, maybe the scene in which Colonel Sanders fixes up Hoshino with a hooker, although there is something going on with sexual energy here). There is also the compelling power of music, whether it is Miss Saeki’s Kafka on the Shore or Beethoven’s Archduke Trio. I wonder about archetypes, if that is the right word, like Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker. This is one of those books I’ve finished but it isn’t finished with me….