Review of Haruki Murakami’s 街とその不確かな壁 (The City and Its Uncertain Walls) (2023)
This review examines Murakami’s latest novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls in depth, including a detailed discussion of the plot. If you are looking to avoid spoilers, I would recommend not reading.
All translations are my own. I’ve included the Japanese as reference.
Introduction — A Different Solution to a Failed Work
Haruki Murakami’s new novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls (街とその不確かな壁) is only 655 pages in the original Japanese (likely around 300 pages in a future English translation), a relatively slim addition to his bibliography, but it still manages to be one of the most boring, uneventful, and poorly organized works in his 44-year writing career. This is ironic given that The City is a rewrite of a 1980 novella, the same novella that Murakami used as the starting point for his 1985 novel, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, his most well structured and arguably strongest novel.
In this new novel, Murakami attempts to examine how loss early in life can affect one’s view of love growing up, but he gets distracted and ends up prioritizing the creation of suggestive moments for readers to ponder for themselves. By the end of the book, he jettisons the narrator’s love interest — the woman who literally created the titular City — in favor of other more mysterious characters. The sentence-level writing isn’t nearly as compelling as his early works. And he uses an apocryphal, racist text as a central metaphor. It’s difficult to express just how bad this book is.
As has become usual since the publication of 1Q84 in 2009, no information was given about the book during its initial announcement on February 1, but when publisher Shinchosha revealed its title on March 1, fans in Japan knew more than usual about what the novel might address as Murakami chose to repurpose the title of the little-known novella…with one minor punctuation adjustment:
1980 novella: 街と、その不確かな壁
2023 novel: 街とその不確かな壁
Murakami removed the comma, presumably for a cleaner look, and provided the English subtitle, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” a departure from the vocabulary in the 1991 translation of Hard-boiled Wonderland which used “Town” and singular “Wall” to describe the haunting town inhabited by flocks of golden unicorns where the narrator serves as the dream reader.
Murakami wrote the novella form of “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” immediately after his second novel Pinball, 1973 and published it in the literary journal Bungakukai. Pinball was a candidate for the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, and Murakami was talked into writing a story that would have served as an immediate post-award work had he won (Bungakukai 1991, 42).
The original novella is narrated in second person and tells the story of an unnamed narrator who’s fallen in love with “you” (君). However, “you” notes that her real self lives in a city surrounded by a wall, and “you” is only her shadow. When he asks how he can go there, she tells him to “want it.” If he wants it enough, he can go there. He does, and when he arrives, he has his shadow separated from him by the Gatekeeper, and begins a quiet, repetitive life reading old dreams in the library where “you” works. The story shares elements with Hard-boiled Wonderland, but in the novella, the narrator escapes the city and seems to grieve the loss of “you” but has no regrets for leaving. The story can be interpreted as a meditation on death and loss, and on the impossibility of truly, authentically connecting with another person.
In 1990, in commentary included with the publication of his Complete Works 1979–1989, Murakami noted that he considered the work a failure and that he regretted writing it:
I wrote the story “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” after Pinball, 1973, but it was premature for me to write about these themes. I didn’t yet have the ability to write about them. I realized this myself immediately after I finished writing. I regretted what I’d done. I probably shouldn’t have published it. But in a different light, my desire to rewrite it and turn it into something more respectable might have grown even stronger precisely because I put it into print. If I hadn’t published “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” at that time, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World might have become an entirely different book from what it is now. For the publication of this Complete Works, my publisher requested that I include “The City and Its Uncertain Walls”, but I didn’t want to. A failed work is a failed work, even if it was ambitious (and the writer hopes it was). I didn’t want it to be exposed to public scrutiny once again. I would ask that readers who absolutely must read it please find a back issue of Bungakukai in the library and read it there.
僕はこの『街とその不確かな壁』という小説を『１９７３年のピンボール』のあとで書いたのだが、このテーマでものを書くのはやはりまだ時期尚早だった。それだけのものを書く能力がまだ僕には備わっていなかったのだ。そのことは書き終えた時点で自分でもわかった。僕は自分がやってしまったことについてはあまり後悔している。発表するべきではなかったんじゃないかと思う。でも考えようによっては、活字にしてしまったなればこそ、なんとかこれを書き直して少しでもまともなものにしたいという思いも強くなったのかもしれない。もし『街とその不確かな壁』をあの時点で活字にしなかったら、『世界の終わりとハードボイルド・ワンダラーンド』は今あるものとは全然違ったかたちのものになっていたかもしれない。今回この全集刊行にあたって『街とその不確かな壁』を全集に収録してほしいという要望が出版社側からなされたのだが、僕としてはそうしたくなかった。たとえそれが志のある失敗作であるにせよ（そうであることを筆者は願っている）、失敗作は失敗作であり、それを改めて衆目に曝したいとは思わない。どうしても読みたいという読者は図書館で『文学界』のバックナンバーをみつけて読んでいただきたいと思う。(Complete Works, V-VI)
The transformation from novella to novel in the form of Hard-boiled Wonderland is one of the most inspired moments in Murakami’s career. He took this fantastical, threatening city surrounded by a wall, renamed it “The End of the World,” and turned it into the inner consciousness of a data agent in near-future “Hard-boiled Wonderland” Tokyo. This data agent created the story within his unconscious as a way to cope with the chaos of a post-modern world. The way the two stories tie together in the end is almost miraculous, and the English translation by Alfred Birnbaum and Elmer Luke is incredibly generous, even if it does abridge a few elements here and there. (A new translation from Jay Rubin is forthcoming, according to David Karashima’s book Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami.)
In a 1994 interview with BOMB magazine, one of the very early English-language interviews with Murakami, he seems to suggest that he was unable to capture his original intent even after re-writing the novella as Hard-boiled Wonderland in 1985:
When I published my first book, Hear the Wind Song*, I wrote a very small piece in the story about a world, a town, surrounded by a high wall. And there was a library in that town. I knew that it wasn’t well written so I just gave up. But I felt there was something very important embedded in that story. After five or six years I expanded it into Hard-Boiled Wonderland. But even then, I felt it was not enough. I felt that there should have been a kind of explosion, a kind of a booster rocket . . . which can blow the mind of a reader.
(*The mistranslation of the title of his first work here could be due to the fact that an “official” translation of the work did not yet exist. A version had been published by Kodansha International in Japan in 1989, but the novel wasn’t published in the U.S. until 2015.)
In an afterword to his new novel, Murakami says that the new book is another “solution” that isn’t intended to replace Hard-boiled Wonderland:
However, as the years went on and I gained experience as a writer and got older, I started to feel as though I hadn’t given proper due to that incomplete work, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” — or perhaps to that work’s potential. Hard-boiled Wonderland the the End of the World was one solution, but I started to think it would be OK for there to be another, different solution. Not as something that would “overwrite” Hard-boiled Wonderland but that would stand alongside it and complement it.
But I couldn’t determine what form that “additional solution” should take.
しかし歳月が経過し、作家としての経験を積み、齢を重ねるにつれ、それだけで「街と、その不確かな壁」という未完成な作品に — あるいは作品の未熟性に — しかるべき決着がつけられたとは思えなくなってきた。『世界の終わりとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド』はそのひとつの対応ではあったが、それとは異なる形の対応があってもいいのではないか、と考えるようになった。「上書きする」というのではなく、あくまで併立し、できることなら補完しあうものとして。
でもその「もうひとつの対応」がどのような形を取り得るのか、なかなかそのヴィジョンを見定めることができなかった。 (659)
At the beginning of 2020, right as the pandemic was beginning, he finally felt confident enough to attempt a rewrite, 40 years after the story’s initial publication. He wrote for three years, rarely leaving the house or traveling. (659–660).
The City and Its Uncertain Walls takes the original novella as a starting point and, as with Hard-boiled Wonderland, threads through another, alternate story, at least for the first third of the novel. He then adds two additional sections. The result is a much more disorganized telling of a story that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to say and thus drifts from idea to new idea over the course of the book.
Summary — A Frankenstein of Murakamis
The City and Its Uncertain Walls was released as a single volume in Japan on April 13 and is divided into three parts. It’s immediately apparent that the balance is somewhat off:
Part I: Chapters 1–26, 184 pages
Part II: Chapters 27–62, 412 pages
Part III: Chapters 63–70, 55 pages
Part I loosely alternates between two different stories both narrated in second person.
In one, a nameless 17-year-old high school boy meets a nameless 16-year-old high school girl — the second-person “you” (きみ, kimi) — at a writing competition. They start dating, frequently write each other letters, and fall in love over the course of a single summer vacation, although it’s clear that “you” is troubled; she freezes up frequently and is convinced she’s just a shadow, that her real self lives somewhere else. This section is set in what seems to be western Japan during what seems to be the present day (we don’t get many specifics).
In the other, a nameless narrator arrives at “the City,” a run-down, anonymous place surrounded by a wall, to be the dream reader in the City’s library where a young girl — also the second-person “you” (also kimi but referred to using the kanji 君) — helps him read “old dreams” in the City’s library.
Unlike Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the connection between these two worlds is given in the very first chapter: The reality-based “you” has imagined up the City and fills in its details with some help from the narrator while on their dates. There is a threatening Gatekeeper, an impenetrable wall, and single-horned beasts that reside there. No one has shadows. Everyone lives a spartan life. Time has no meaning, yet the seasons pass and snow fills the City as winter sets in and the narrator maps out the City.
In the reality side of the narrative, “you” eventually disappears and leaves the narrator devastated. We follow him through a condensed description of his adulthood. He never fully recovers from the loss; he’s able to date and work through his 20s and 30s, but the place in his heart he reserves for “you” prevents a long-term connection with anyone else. Murakami writes this character with so much naiveté and sincerity that he comes across as pathetic at times.
Then at 45, the narrator has a fall. When and where this literal fall happens, he claims not to remember, but he awakens in the City surrounded by a wall. Thus we realize that half the story we’ve been reading to this point — the half set in the City — is actually the middle-aged narrator reuniting with “you” in the imaginary City that they dreamed up together 28 years earlier.
Part I ends as the narrator helps his shadow escape from the City and decides to stay there himself, much like the ending of Hard-boiled Wonderland.
In Part II, however, our nameless narrator finds himself back in the reality of Japan, working the same publishing job and once again devastated; he had nothing to return to and believed he was staying on in a utopia of sorts but was punted back to his 9-to-5. He loses all desire to do anything and decides to quit.
The bulk of this part of the book is a random journey of discovery, with the emphasis on random. A dream inspires him to seek out a library job, and based on his intuition alone, he moves to a rural town referred to as “Z” in the mountains an hour or so outside of Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture.
There he takes over as director of a small library for the mysterious Koyasu, a skirt-wearing, beret-topped 70-something dandy who has donated the fortune from his family’s sake business to the town’s library. As with many Murakami protagonists, the narrator becomes isolated and set in his routine. He discovers Koyasu is actually dead, which means he had his job interview and orientation training from a ghost. He develops a crush on the owner of a local cafe. And he relies on the bespectacled librarian Soeda for help running the library and learning about Koyasu’s history: Koyasu unexpectedly fell in love only to experience the devastating loss of the small family he built. Six soul-crushingly boring chapters in the middle of the novel are spent in one-on-one conversations with Koyasu’s ghost and then Soeda while learning this information.
Part II is rounded out by the boy referred to alternately as “the Yellow Submarine boy” (イエロー・サブマリンの少年), “the boy wearing the Yellow Submarine hoodie” (イエロー・サブマリンのパーカを着た少年), and M (M**くん), who shows up to read books at the library every day because he was not accepted to high school. He is depicted as an autistic savant who is unable to communicate effectively but devours books and can name the day of the week a person was born on when given the date. Part of the narrator’s routine is to visit Koyasu’s grave, but when the Yellow Submarine boy secretly overhears him talking about his experiences to the grave one day, he becomes obsessed with the City surrounded by a wall and longs to read old dreams in the library there.
The narrator mulls over the ethics of letting the Yellow Submarine boy go to the City and disappear from reality, leaving behind a family which seems not to care for him much. The ghost of Koyasu relieves the narrator of any burden during one of their periodic chats in a semi-subterranean room in the bowels of the library, telling him that it’s not his choice, the boy can go to the City on his own. Shortly later the boy disappears, and the narrator is questioned by his family.
None of this ends up mattering. Nor does his burgeoning romance with the unnamed coffee shop proprietor. The narrator somehow drifts off into “the farthest conceptual reaches of reality” (現実のいちばん端っこに存在する観念) (589) during a dreamlike state in the last chapter of this section of the novel. He walks up the path of a shallow river, as he did when he was a kid, slowly growing younger Benjamin Button-style, and eventually reunites with “you” who tells him they are just shadows.
Part III takes the reader back to the City surrounded by a wall, where the narrator has continued to serve as dream reader. At this point we realize that we were following the narrator’s shadow’s return to reality while the “host” (本体) stayed in the City. The narrator begins to notice a boy wearing a Yellow Submarine hoodie in the City and is soon confronted by him in a dream. The boy informs him that they must combine so that he is able to read old dreams. Once combined, the boy then tells the narrator that it’s time for him (the narrator) to leave the City, which can be accomplished simply by blowing out the candle in the small room of his inner conscious where they have their meetings. The book ends with the narrator blowing out the candle and a fade to darkness.
Suffice it to say that the ending is not the “explosion” that Murakami claims to have been trying to write back in 1980.
In effect, the book feels very much like a Frankenstein of different eras of Murakami as a writer. Some sections are taken verbatim from his early novella, and Part I feels at times like 1980s Murakami, with his tendency to leave characters nameless and somewhat anonymous. It also focuses on loss and grieving, which were themes that drove his early novels. This gives way to Part II, where Murakami narrates reality in much greater detail and uses de facto third-person narration to tell parts of Koyasu’s story, which feels more stylistically similar to recent novels like The Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.
As with Murakami from any era, the ending feels ambiguous and unfinished. He could very well add an additional volume to the book in the coming years, as he did with The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84, although Murakami has already let this novel breath to a certain extent. In the afterword, he notes that he wrote Part I and thought he might be finished, so he let the novel sit for six months before realizing that the story needed to continue (660).
Scattered Images — Love and The City
The novel’s biggest weakness is the overall lack of cohesion. Murakami prioritizes creating suggestive moments and images for readers to ruminate rather than constructing the novel in a way that would tie everything together.
Part I is an examination of love and grief, similar to Murakami’s early works. His narrator in his first three books Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase is going through a process of grieving and loss combined with and a separation from his own city: the same 街 (machi, city/town) used in the title of this new novel. He’s lost a girlfriend to suicide, his Kansai hometown is rapidly losing its coastline to development, and the student movement in Tokyo crumbles as the country pivots to growth going into the 1970s. At the same time, he has no hometown to return to; it’s unrecognizable when he returns to run a favor for a close friend in A Wild Sheep Chase, so he cuts ties with it.
In one reading, The City could be taken as a condensed portrait of that same narrator’s adolescence and an alternate adulthood. Here, however, Murakami simplifies the focus to the loss of a first love, “you.” “The City” functions as a metaphor for the relationship. It’s a world two people build together through a negotiation. The closest that two individuals can ever come to being truly unified. But the metaphor is muddled compared to Hard-boiled Wonderland. There the Town served as a metaphor for an individual’s relationship with the world as the narrator discovers that he’s actively destroying the last remaining pieces of people’s free will. Society serves as a controlling mechanism and asks us to play a role in the destruction of our individuality. Here, on the other hand, it’s not clear what Murakami wants to say with the City beyond constructing the initial relationship metaphor.
The examination of love continues into Part II where Koyasu serves as a literal kindred spirit. During a one-on-one, Koyasu has this to say:
“What I want to say is this: Once you’ve experienced pure, unadulterated love, so to speak, a portion of your self is irradiated. In a certain sense, it’s incinerated. Especially when that love is, for some reason, suddenly severed midway through. That kind of love is, for the person involved, both supreme bliss and a terrible curse. …”
「わたくしの申し上げたいのはこういうことです。いったん混じりけのない純粋な愛を味わったものは、言うなれば、心の一部が熱く照射されてしまうのです。ある意味焼け切れてしまうのです。とりわけその愛が何らかの理由によって、途中できっぱり断ち切られてしまったような場合には。そのような愛は当人にとって無上の至福であると同時に、ある意味厄介な呪いでもあります。…」 (380)
Toward the end of Part II, there’s a notable shift away from love and loss in favor of representing the narrator’s stream of consciousness. We follow him as he tries to interact with his cafe owner crush and at the same time is having trouble remembering the fifth Russian composer included in The Five, while reliving the memory of getting an erection on a train at age 17.
In Part III, this all gives way to what feels like a last-minute effort to explain the mythology for the world he’s created. The librarian “you” — although, she becomes “her,” as Murakami abandons second-person narration — is ignored almost completely in these chapters in favor of one-on-one conversations with the the Yellow Submarine boy. Now that the boy has left the reality in which he’s an autistic savant, he’s able to speak normally and explain how he’ll read dreams for the narrator. But the purpose of reading these dreams, their connection to the City, and what any of it has to do with love and death, is all totally opaque.
Murakami also tacks on two mentions of a “pandemic.” The narrator’s shadow in the City is convinced that the City is actually full of shadows and that the narrator is the only non-shadow “host” (本体). He exists merely to release excess bits of soul that cling to the shadows, to prevent “the seeds of a pandemic” (疫病のたね) (149). Later in the book, when the socially awkward Yellow Submarine boy manages to approach the narrator and have a very simple conversation about the City in Part II, he tells the narrator that the City’s wall was built around it to protect it from a pandemic. Not a literal pandemic, but an unending metaphorical pandemic of the soul. This idea is introduced on pages 149 and again on 447 and then isn’t mentioned again. Murakami was writing during a pandemic and must have felt some need to incorporate it into the work, so it got thrown into the book.
The novel is also filled with “Murakami logic.” These are moments where the narrator is unable to do something perfectly logical — broach a subject or take an action — due to some outside force or to his own insisted system of logic. At one point, he notices that Koyasu’s watch has no hands, which reminds him of the handless clocks in the City. Yet “something” tells the narrator that he shouldn’t ask about this. And when Koyasu’s wife struggles with her mental health after the death of their son, of course there’s no use talking to a professional:
Neither could he talk to a doctor. Because he didn’t think it would be easy to find a doctor who could solve his wife’s problems. They were likely serious problems originating in a deep part of her psyche.
医師に相談するわけにもいかない。妻の抱えている問題を解決してくれるような医師が簡単に見つかるとは思えなかったからだ。それはおそらく彼女の精神のずっと深いところに生じている深刻な問題なのだ。 (329)
The narrator also assumes that he can’t address the Yellow Submarine boy after realizing that he’s been overheard at Koyasu’s grave. It would be as simple as saying a quick hello and trying to start a conversation, yet he opts to ignore the boy and continue on with his usual routine, having a muffin at the town’s cafe. Often these a-logical moments seem crafted to maintain a sense of suspense or surprise that is prioritized over logical continuity. And the surprises in this book aren’t as exciting as some in his past novels.
In addition to the novel’s basic lack of cohesion, Murakami makes two critical failures that are repeats of problems from his past novels: He introduces didactic pop culture elements of questionable origin and he depicts women with, to borrow a phrase from Terry Nguyen, “negligent cruelty.”
Pop Culture Drops — Murakami Climbs Too High
Jay Rubin has commented in great detail on Murakami’s growing reliance on didacticism in his pop culture references from Kafka on the Shore onward (Rubin 289–294) as well as his “unrelieved seriousness” (Rubin 293). These two tendencies are combined in The City.
The pop cultural references are relatively few in number, given that Part I is narrated with an intentional vagueness. The references gain steam as the reader moves through Part II and follows the narrator to Z Town. Toward the end of the novel, there are two uncomfortable ideas introduced.
In the first, the nameless woman who owns the cafe makes a less than tasteful comparison to Anne Frank when the narrator notes that her stationary, solitary life must be pretty easy:
“Yeah, it is convenient. I can take care of shopping online, all the stock for the cafe gets delivered, and the stores on the shopping arcade will do for most of my daily shopping needs, so there’s really no need for me to go out. Living this way makes me think of that movie The Diary of Anne Frank. That hidden room in Amsterdam where she was living. With its low ceilings and small windows…”
“No one is after you, and you’re not trying to evade anyone. You’re just living the life you chose for yourself.”
“But as I live my life moving between back and forth between these small spaces on the first and second floors, I just start to get that feeling without even realizing it. The delusion that I’m being chased, like someone or something won’t stop coming after me and I’m hiding from that impending threat.”
「そうね。便利なことはとても便利よ。ちょっとした買い物はインターネットの通販で片付くし、店の仕入れはほとんど配達してもらうし、日常生活に必要なものは商店街の近所のお店で間に合うし、だから外に出る必要もあまりないの。ただずっとこういうところで生活していると、つい映画の『アンネの日記』を思い出してしまうの。アムステルダムで彼女が暮らしていた隠し部屋。天井が低くて、窓が小さくて……」
「君は誰かに追いかけられているわけじゃないし、人目を忍んで生きているわけでもない。自分で前向きに選択した人生を生きているだけだ」
「でもこんな狭いところで、一階と二階を行き来するだけの生活を送っていると、知らず知らずそういう気持ちになってくるのよ。追跡妄想っていうか、自分が誰かに、何かに執拗に追われていて、差し迫った危険から身を潜めているみたいな」(579–580)
Murakami has used this idea of being alone and pursued in past works, but it seems like an unnecessary reach to drawn a comparison with a Holocaust victim. The narrator does protest a bit, but Murakami has the cafe owner double down on the comparison.
The worst offender comes in Part III when the boy in the Yellow Submarine hoodie out of nowhere uses the discounted and apocryphal text The Papalagi as a metaphor for what he and the narrator have accomplished by getting him into the City’s library:
The Yellow Submarine boy began by asking me a question: “Have you read The Papalagi?”
We were seated across from each other with a candle flame between in the small room deep underground.
“I read it when I was younger,” I said. “It was quite a long time ago, so I can’t remember the details, but I seem to recall it was about a tribal chief from some island in Samoa telling the people in his village about his experience traveling to Europe at the beginning of the 19th century.”
“That’s correct. However, we now know that it was complete fiction, that a German writer used the form of a tribal chief telling his tale. It’s apocryphal. Despite this, there was a time when the book was widely read and believed to be an actual account. It makes sense. The book was well written. And it was a critique of modern civilization filled with humor and wisdom.”
「『パパラギ』という本を読んだことはありますか？」
イエロー・サブマリンの少年は私にそう切り出した。地下深くの小部屋で、私と彼はロウソクの炎を間にはさんで座っていた。
私は言った。「若いころに読んだよ。かなり以前のことなので、細かいことは思い出せないけれど、たしかサモアのどこかの島の酋長が二十世紀初頭に、ヨーロッパを旅行した体験を故郷の人たちに向けて語るという内容だったと記憶している」
「そのとおりです。ただしこれは今日では、ドイツ人の著者が、酋長の語りという形式を借りてつくりあげた、純粋なフィクションだと判明しています。いわゆる偽書です。しかしこの本が多くの人々によって手に取られ、読まれた時代には、本物の手記だと思われていました。無理もありません。よくできた、そしてユーモアと叡智に満ちた近代文明への批評になっていますから」(636–637)
The Yellow Submarine boy goes on:
“… The tribal chief gathers everyone and tells them, ‘No one has ever climbed a palm tree higher than the palm tree he had his legs around at the time.’ Here he’s likely using this to ridicule Europeans putting up buildings in their cities ever higher. ‘No one has ever climbed a palm tree higher than the palm tree he had his legs around at the time.’ This expression is very concrete and easy to understand. Anyone can understand this allegory, as well as what it implies. You can imagine the audience — had there been an audience — around this tribal chief nodding in agreement. No matter how skilled a person is at climbing trees, they cannot climb higher than a palm tree.”
I remained silent, waiting for him to continue his story, as though I were a Samoan islander waiting to be enlightened.
“However, and this might go against what the tribal chief was saying, but what if we thought about it like this. What if there was actually someone who could climb higher than a palm tree? What if we are those people?”
酋長は集まったみんなに向かって言います。『誰でも足を使って椰子の木に登るが、椰子の木よりも高く登った者は、まだ一人もいない』。これはおそらくヨーロッパ人が都市に高い建物を建設し、上へ上へと向かって伸びていくことを揶揄した発言です。『誰でも足を使って椰子の木に登るが、椰子の木よりも高く登った者は、まだ一人もいない』。とても具体的でわかりやすい表現です。誰が聞いてもわかる喩え話です。そしてまた含蓄に富んでいます。この酋長の話をまわりで聞いている聴衆は──もちろん実際に聴衆がそこにいたとすればですが──うんうんと肯いていたことでしょうね。どれほど木登りが巧みな人でも、椰子の木そのものより高く登ることはまずできませんから」
私は黙って彼の話の続きを待っていた。まるで新たな知識を待ち受けるサモアの島の住人のように。
「しかし、酋長の話には逆らうようですが、ひとつこのように考えてみてはどうでしょう。つまり、椰子の木よりも高く椰子の木を登ってしまった人間は、まったくいないわけではないのだと。たとえばここにいるぼくとあなたは、まさにそのような人間ではないでしょうか」(637–638)
Murakami as author clearly recognizes that The Papalagi is a work of fiction, but he seems to take the content of the text credulously despite the fact that it isn’t true and fails to acknowledge how colonialist and racist it is on a fundamental level. In fact, Erich Scheurmann, the German author who invented the book’s content, ended up joining the Nazi party and advocating its tenets (Todorov).
This is not to say that Murakami is a Nazi. Far from it. It does, however, suggest that he’s made the same mistake here as with his insensitive depiction of aggressive feminists in Kafka on the Shore, for which he ended up apologizing to a reader who submitted a complaint to his website that was online at the time (Rubin 293). There’s an intellectual negligence, along the same lines as the negligence in his treatment of women.
Women in The City
Murakami also continues his uncomfortable depiction of women in The City and Its Uncertain Walls.
First and foremost, the two most central women in the novel — “you” and the nameless cafe owner — are both depicted as wounded people, and not much else. Not long after they start dating, “you” shows up late to a date and has trouble interacting with the narrator. She explains that
“Sometimes I get like this…my heart stiffens up” (ときどき、こうなってしまうの … こころがこわばりついてしまう) (87).
The cafe owner has ensconced herself in Z Town to escape a cheating husband, and she admits to never having had any pleasure in sex. Murakami has written women like this in the past, but unlike Naoko in Norwegian Wood or Shimamoto in South of the Border, West of the Sun, Murakami doesn’t give readers enough time with these characters to make them seem like anything other than empty, broken people.
So when Murakami has “you” say that she wants to become one with the narrator:
“I want to be yours,” you say in a whisper. “I want to become one with you. For real.”
「あなたのものになりたい」ときみは囁くように言う。「あなたとひとつになりたい。ほんとうよ」
It feels like he’s having her do so in service of his metaphor of the City rather than to build the character.
One of the best examples of his treatment of women in The City is reflected how he depicts characters making tea. In the City surrounded by a wall, “you” serves as the librarian. The narrator explains her duties:
Your duties at the library are to protect and appropriately care for the old dreams kept there. You select the dreams to be read and keep a record in a ledger that they have been read. You open up the library doors at dusk, light the lamps, and start a fire in the stove during the cold season. For this, you ensure the rapeseed oil and firewood doesn’t run out. And you prepare the thick, medicinal green-colored tea for the Dream Reader — in other words, for me. It heals my eyes and quiets my soul.
図書館における君の職務は、そこに並ぶ古い夢を護り、適切に管理することだ。読まれるべき夢を選び、それが読まれたという記録を帳簿に残す。夕刻前に図書館の扉を開け、ランプの明かりを灯し、寒い季節であればストーブに火を入れる。そのための、なたね油と薪を切らさないようにしておく。そして〈夢読み〉のために──つまりこの私のために──濃い緑色の薬草茶を用意する。それは私の眼を癒やし、心を鎮めてくれる。 (39–40)
The librarian in The City almost perfectly encapsulates one of the criticisms Mieko Kawakami leveled at Murakami in her 2017 long-form interview, part of which was translated into English in 2020: “A common reading is that your male characters are fighting their battles unconsciously, on the inside, leaving the women to do the fighting in the real world.” The librarian/“you” deals with the “real”-world details while the narrator quietly sits at a desk, channeling the old dreams.
Later, in Part II, the narrator is impressed with Koyasu’s tea-making ceremony:
Koyasu got up from his chair and took the kettle puffing white clouds of steam on top of the stove. He spun it around in the air with a skillful touch to settle the boiling water. The large kettle was full of water and likely quite heavy, but the way he handled it didn’t make it seem that way. Next he precisely measured the tea leaves with a measuring spoon, put them in a warmed ceramic teapot, and carefully poured in hot water. He put the lid on the pot, closed his eyes, and clicked to a standing position in front of it like a well-trained royal guard. This was the procedure he always went through. It was more ritual than procedure.
子易さんは椅子から立ち上がり、ストーブの上で白い湯気を上げていた薬罐を手に取った。そして沸騰した湯を落ち着かせるべく、器用な手つきでそれを宙でくるくると回した。たっぷり水を張った大きな薬罐はかなりの重さがあるはずだが、彼の手つきは見るものにそんなことを感じさせなかった。それから紅茶の葉を計量スプーンで正確に量り、適温に温めておいた白い陶器のポットに入れ、そこに注意深くお湯を注いだ。ポットに蓋をしてその前で目を閉じ、よく訓練された王宮の衛兵みたいにぴたりと直立した姿勢を取った。いつもと同じ手順だ。いや、手順と言うよりは儀式に近いかもしれない。(284)
So it feels awkward when the narrator later asks the librarian Soeda to bring he and the Yellow Submarine boy tea in Chapter 50 rather than making it himself. It would have been a perfect moment to upend gender stereotypes and have the narrator demonstrate Koyasu’s tea ritual for the boy.
Soeda is an extremely hollow character throughout the course of the book. She serves mostly as a source of information about the town and practically runs the library on her own while the narrator sits at his desk and thinks about what books the library should order, which seems to be the only duties he has. Given such a light workload, it seems strange that she wasn’t offered the position of library director herself and could even be interpreted to mean that a woman can’t serve as library director in the town.
This kind of writing makes it difficult to ignore one-off instances of the narrator’s uncomfortable male gaze:
I thanked Soeda, and she turned around in her light green flare skirt. Her healthy calves left an image on the back of my eyes.
私は添田さんに礼を言い、彼女は若草色のフレア・スカートの裾を翻して、自分の持ち場に引き上げていった。彼女の健康的なふくらはぎが私の網膜に残った。 (416)
The most generous reading of the treatment of women might be that all the characters in Murakami’s fiction often serve only as echo chambers for the narrator. As Terry Nguyen notes in her recent review of Osamu Dazai, “…his disregard for [women’s] interior state begets a negligent cruelty. This cruelty is embedded in the greater landscape of his fiction.” In The City, only Koyasu is depicted with any real humanity. The Yellow Submarine boy and his family in particular are narrated at arm’s length. There’s no attempt to write any of their interactions in scene in a way that might make them more real. Thus, we have the narrator frequently asking himself questions and then answering them for other characters as in this passage:
Nobody knew whether or not he was fulfilled by this clockwork lifestyle, whether he felt any joy in it, because it was impossible to read any sort of expression on his face. However, he must have found it very meaningful to devote himself to going through a set pattern of behavior day after day. The repetition of those actions might have been the goal, rather than the actions themselves or the direction they took him.
彼がそういう、判で押したように進行する日々の生活に満足しているのか、そこに喜びらしきものを感じているのか、それは誰にもわからない。少年の顔からは表情というものが読み取れなかったからだ。しかし日々の決まった行動パターンをひとつひとつ正確になぞって踏襲していくことが、彼にとってはきっと大事な意味を持つのだろう。行為の本質や方向性よりは、反復そのものが目的となっているのかもしれない。 (411)
Nobody knows because nobody bothers to ask, least of all the narrator of the novel.
Breathless Inversion
The one last specific point I’d like to address is Murakami’s sentence-level writing. There’s some evidence that his writing style is becoming staid. There’s a breathless, parenthetic quality to the sentences, driven by the notable overuse of the grammatical technique along the lines of 倒置 (tōchi, inversion). This is relatively common both in casual spoken Japanese and literary written Japanese in which an element (an object, subject, adverb, adverbial phrase, etc.) is placed after another element it would usually precede.
For example, in casual spoken Japanese, a speaker might use this technique to specify the object of a verb: 買ったよ、新作を (Katta yo, shinsaku o; I bought it, the new novel).
In Murakami’s case, he tends to add inverted adverbial phrases in many different forms after an initial statement. Here’s an example:
Your shadow died long ago, I repeat within myself. Like an echo deep within a cave.
君の影はずっと昔に死んだ、と私はその言葉を心の内で繰り返す。洞窟の奥のこだまみたいに。(157)
He uses an adverbial phrase as a full sentence with the adverbial constructor のように (no yō ni) in sentence-ending position. The English translation doesn’t necessarily need to mirror the Japanese construction, but I’ve done so above in order to demonstrate the effect.
This tendency is unremarkable until you start counting. Murakami uses のように (no yō ni, as though/like) and みたいに (mitai ni, as though/like) 198 times in sentence-ending adverbial phrase inversions over the course of the novel. This count doesn’t include all the inversions he uses with other grammatical constructions. Here are a few examples from the course of the novel:
The surface [of the dream] is as hard as marble and perfectly slick. But it doesn’t have the weight of marble. I don’t know what material it’s made of or how durable it is. Would it break if I dropped it on the ground? At any rate, I must handle it with extreme care. Like I’m handling the egg of some rare life form.
表面は大理石のように硬質で、つるりと滑らかだ。しかし大理石の重みはない。それがどのような材質でできているのか、どれほどの強度を有するものなのか、私にはわからない。床に落としたら割れてしまうのだろうか？ 何はともあれ、それらはとても注意深く扱われなくてはならない。希少な生物の卵を扱うのと同じように。 (39)
I stare into her eyes. As though searching for the bottom of a clear mountain spring.
私は彼女の目をのぞき込む。山間の澄んだ泉の底を探るように。 (159)
I’ve finally started heading somewhere. I have inertia and am slowly moving forward. Pressed forcefully by this incredibly vivid dream.
私はようやくどこかに向けて動き始める。新たな慣性を得て徐々に前進を始める。生々しく鮮やかな夢に強く後押しをされて。 (196)
At any rate, the place I belonged had changed. Even if the direction that new place would guide me had not yet been defined.
私の人生は何はともあれ居場所を変更したのだ。その変更された環境が私をこれからどのような方向に導くのか、まだ見定められないにせよ。 (277)
I close my eyes and quietly wait for her to return. My heart beats firmly and uniformly. Like the sound of a woodpecker in a grove of trees.
私は目を閉じて、静かに彼女が戻るのを待ち受ける。私の心臓は堅く規則正しく脈打っている。木立の中でキツツキが立てる音のように。 (605)
The result is that it constantly feels like the narrator is reaching. Like he might be able to describe something perfectly. As though it will perhaps come to him in the very next sentence.
How does this compare with Murakami’s past novels? In Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World — which, again, was based on the same novella — Murakami used のように and みたいに in sentence ending position only three times over the course of the entire book.
Expecting a writer’s style to stay the same over the course of a 40 year career is, I think obviously, a somewhat insane way to read them. Murakami’s style has changed dramatically over the years. He started off writing spare prose. Experimented with a Raymond Chandler-esque hard-boiled style. Practiced realism with Norwegian Wood. And then developed a denser style with novels like The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Sputnik Sweetheart before testing third-person narration in 1Q84. Murakami has called this post-Norwegian Wood style 総合的 (“comprehensive”) (Murakami 2017, 64).
But this over-reliance on inversion feels like a new development. On one hand, judging from the afterword, Murakami seems to feel more confident than ever about his prose. However, it’s not clear that the work itself backs up that confidence. Both on a micro and macro level, this is not great writing.
Conclusion — The Mystery Continues
The BBC has reported that an English translation will be available later this year, which would be a very quick turnaround. It will be fascinating to see the reception to this novel in translation, especially given that his readership has a long-loved translation of Hard-boiled Wonderland to compare it against.
I imagine the differences between the two novels will be stark. Hard-boiled Wonderland is one of Murakami’s strongest works, and if the “End of the World” sections were separated out into an independent work, it could be argued that it would be Murakami’s most well-crafted novel. The pacing is perfect as the narrator arrives in the Town and is pressed into action by his shadow. He maps out the Town, falls in love with the librarian who is depicted as curious and resilient, and befriends the Colonel, a wise, aged resident with traces of his former self still intact. The scenes are understated in a beautiful way.
The City excises any sense of narrative drive from the equivalent section of the story. The shadow is a muted character. Gone is his desperation and anger. The librarian feels empty and even hostile at times. The Gatekeeper is not as threatening and is largely absent.
Most notably, the City is devoid of purpose. In Hard-boiled Wonderland, the ties between “The End of the World” and the reality of Tokyo give the events in the fantastical Town an urgency that is lacking in The City. There’s a sense that the narrator might eventually be able to reunite with “you” at some point, but because Murakami prioritizes surprising his reader, the narrator’s arrival to the City does not feel like a culmination of over 25 years of longing. There’s no excitement or familiarity. Just the same muted awe from Hard-boiled Wonderland without any stakes for the characters.
Murakami clearly recognizes how good Hard-boiled Wonderland is. Not only does he borrow the story’s central element — the City — he also tries to reinvent the central linguistic challenge. In 1985 he used two first person pronouns to differentiate the alternating chapters; 私 (watashi) narrates the outer world of Tokyo, while 僕 (boku) narrates the inner world. He attempts to do the same in 2023, except the delineation isn’t as clear, and the attempt to write reality “you” in hiragana vs the City “you” in kanji just falls flat, especially after he gives up on second person narration after Part I.
I’ve probably neglected to mention countless aspects of the novel. The stories within a story that contain characteristically Murakami-esque moments of the bizarre, which are then abandoned. Explicit references to Gabriel García Márquez that feel like a desperate attempt to puff up the book’s magic realist bona fides. The way that characters in the novel keep secrets in a typically Murakami way that artificially creates suspense.
It all feels like so much window dressing, much in the same way that Murakami cut a single comma from the title of a 1980 novella to reuse as the title of his 2023 novel. If readers were hoping for a return to form, this book is not it. With every new novel, Murakami reveals that his strongest fiction is well in the past and there’s no way for him to return to the place from which he wrote it.
Works Cited
聞き書 村上春樹 この十年1979年～1988 (Murakami Haruki’s Account — These 10 Years, 1979–1989). Bungeishunju, “The Murakami Book,” Bungakukai 1991, 45(5).
自作を語る (Telling the Story of my Works), Murakami Haruki Complete Works 1979–1989 Vol. 4, Kodansha, 1990.
Harding, John Wesley. “Haruki Murakami.” BOMB. #46 January 1, 1994.
街とその不確かな壁 (The City and Its Uncertain Walls), Shinchosha, 2023.
Rubin, Jay. Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, Vintage, 2005.
Nguyen, Terry. “Unfettered Misanthropy: On Osamu Dazai’s ‘The Flowers of Buffoonery’.” Los Angeles Review of Books. April 30, 2023.
Scheurmann, Erich. The Papalagi. Real Free Press International. trans. Martin Beumer. 1976.
Todorov, Jordan. “The Hoax Book That Became an Anarchist and Hippie Bible.” Atlas Obscura, September 8, 2020.
“A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself.” Lit Hub. trans. Sam Bet and David Boyd. April 7, 2020.
Murakami, Haruki. 村上春樹翻訳ほとんど全仕事 (Almost All of Murakami Haruki’s Translation Work). Chuokoron-Shinsha. 2017.
If you’re interested in hearing more of my thoughts about the book, please check out my podcast discussion of this review.
