Sometimes it’s difficult to witness the precipitous quality drop of a great writer. In the case of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, the drop in quality is less disastrous than it is tedious. Murakami’s new novel “The City and its Uncertain Walls” comes six years after “Killing Commendatore,” itself an excessive mixture of perversity and magic realism. Murakami’s new novel has its origins in a short story published in 1980 and his 1985 novel “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.”
Obviously the fantasy-magic realism pattern worked and Murakami figured he could take it out again for one more ride. All the expected elements are in place for this new one but the magic has vanished. A nameless man has a job reading dreams that are stored on shelves of a library. The man and the library exist in a town surrounded by a wall. The one entry and exit point is watched over by a Gatekeeper. The one entry point requirement for this man and all others into the city is that they surrender their shadows. In effect, there are two populations living parallel lives, the humans reading dreams (for unexplained reasons) and their shadows trying to find meaning.
It’s this first part of three that most closely connected with “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” Our hero speaks to us first as a lovesick teenager, transfixed by a sensitive girlfriend who claims her real self is locked away in a town with a very high wall. Pages of this new novel are filled with tedious descriptions of the city, its beasts and weird looking fish. Decades pass without much consequence and our hero finds himself working at a Tokyo book distribution company and living in the imagined city. He has become the designated Dream Reader and he is joined at work by the still young and tortured teen girlfriend of his youth.
The fact that our hero is content with this dream haze world is nice, but it doesn’t make for exciting reading. The walls talk. The shadows talk. There are long explanations of how to get through the city, slip outside the view of the Gatekeeper, and enter the other world, the “real” world. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be too much at risk. Why would they want to leave? What are they hoping to find on the other side?
Murakami has long been enamored of “The Wizard of Oz and Alice In Wonderland,” but he’s played those cards too many times in his forty-five years as a novelist. Murakami’s people will always be listening to the cool West Coast jazz of Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck, going after unattainable women, drinking whiskey and falling down real and symbolic water holes. The problem is that reading these trademark elements in Murakami now are like attending another concert from your favorite musician. They’re playing their old hits, but their hearts are somewhere else. On an off night, which “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” definitely is, all the notes played are sour and off-key.
This novel’s long middle section takes us to the “real” world. Our hero is adrift (as most Murakami heroes tend to be) and quits his Tokyo life. He finds a conventional job as a librarian in this real world, meeting more characters and dealing with more haunted longing. He takes over from a dead boss who only visits him and a fellow employee. Our hero involves himself primarily with a young library patron, a voracious reader dressed as a character from the Beatles film “Yellow Submarine” and is only referred to as such through the duration of this section. Fortunately this large middle section is the novel’s only saving grace because it allows us to invest in these characters. The “Yellow Submarine” boy brings our hero back to the city and its walls through part three, and the reader feels relieved that some resolution might finally be in reach. Unfortunately, the only way we know a resolution is at hand is because we can literally feel it in our hands. This resolution is less a tidy and effective conclusion for our characters than it is a welcome relief for patient readers.
The major problem with “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” isn’t the tired effect of Murakami’s old tricks but rather the clunkiness of the prose. In this novel, time passes like “a slender cat stealthily making its way along the top of a wall.” Characters “vanish like smoke” and sometimes it seems as if he’s just given up. Tea is “greenish,” cups are “largish,” and sometimes the descriptions are replaced with the word “something.” If the intention here was to replicate some sort of child-like vision in prose, it’s not working. Maybe it’s also the fault of translator Philip Gabriel, but placing blame is fruitless here. The awkward prose here is unsettling not in the service of a theme; it’s just juvenile.
If a writer asks us to accept the absurd and unexplained, there should be a resolution at the end. In several interviews, Murakami has noted that “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” was written during the duration of the Covid 19 lockdown. It’s an apt metaphor, to be confined and not allowed to leave for fear of the unknown. We are separated from our shadows and hoping to reunite with them. Murakami reflects in a recent interview: “How is it possible for both extreme isolation and empathy to coexist?” Perhaps it’s best to read this novel as a clear metaphor of the struggles we all faced when we were all shut off from the world.
Murakami writes in an afterword to this novel that its story “…felt like a small fish bone caught in my throat, something that bothered me.” It’s an unfortunate metaphor by which to rationalize what we’ve just read. Did he wash this fishbone down his throat and properly digest it, or did it almost kill him as he coughed it up? The generous reader would be best to cut Murakami some slight slack here with “The City and Its Uncertain Walls.” It’s a meditation on isolation brought on by a worldwide plague. We lose our shadows, become ghosts, try to reconnect with those shadows, and eventually fade away. In that light, and in spite of its major problems, this is a novel worth reading. Had Murakami’s editors been willing to cut it by perhaps twenty-five percent, it would have been a novel worth rereading and savoring.
