Since 1979, Haruki Murakami has written more than a dozen imaginative novels dealing with the nature of reality. He says he tends to incorporate strange events that occur while writing into otherwise realistic stories. Filmmaker Arthur Jafa has described a similar process of creating energy by placing dissonant scenes in proximity. In a Murakami novel, this might look like a character stuck in Tokyo traffic one moment and arriving in a parallel universe with two moons the next.
But the reality of 2024 feels different than 2018, when we last received a Murakami book. Since then, we have faced a deadly pandemic, historic social protests, the growing devastation of climate change, a resurgence of reactionary politics, and outbreaks of war. It is into this real-life dystopia that Murakami's latest novel arrives.
“The city and its uncertain walls” bears the author's identity. There is a love story and references to jazz, the Beatles and cats. There is a young man (named Yellow Submarine Boy) who is both intellectually gifted and socially divergent. Murakami develops strange details in the convincing way we expect.
But does your latest novel talk about the current moment? Is it, as the editor suggests, “a parable of these strange post-pandemic times”?
Murakami is from Kyoto, an ancient Japanese capital with historic cultural institutions. In July 1945, the United States removed Kyoto from its list of atomic destruction targets. Instead of bombing Kyoto the following month, we destroyed Nagasaki. Murakami was born four years after that holocaust.
When he was 2 years old, his family moved to the port city of Kobe. He has said that his proximity to the water and the diverse immigrant populations that passed through it shaped his writing. Other likely influences include his father, who was a literature professor, and his experience of coming of age in the 1960s, a time of revolutionary imagination.
When Murakami sat down to expand “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” first published as a novella in 1980, he was 71 years old and the world was on the brink of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I started writing this novel in March 2020,” Murakami tells us in the book's afterword, “just as the coronavirus began to ravage Japan and ended it almost three years later.” He adds that he rarely left the house during this time and wrote every day.
The context of the pandemic is especially present at the end of the novel. The beginning, however, is for hardcore Murakami fans.
It is then that Dream Reader, the narrator, falls in love with a girl whose memory will haunt him throughout his life. She tells him about a city where, she says, her real self lives. Surrounded by a high wall, it has a river, a gatekeeper, magical beasts, and a library full of egg-shaped dreams that the reader must decipher.
Shortly after the girl tells the narrator about this city, she disappears. Not being able to find her, he becomes discouraged. He spends his youth floating without inspiration, falling into a routine of repetitive and boring work. Years later, a ghost named Mr. Koyasu tells him: “Once you have tasted pure, unadulterated love, it is as if part of your heart has been irradiated, in a sense burned.”
Anguish leads the narrator to the walled city. After his arrival, a janitor hurts his eyes, separates him from his shadow, and assigns him to be the library's dream reader.
Throughout the novel, which spans three decades, the narrator travels between the imagined city and the real world, searching for a human connection that is always out of reach. The details of the two worlds become confused. Time too. Both places have libraries with underground rooms and wood stoves. And people in both places struggle to know themselves because of the emotional walls they build.
But the worlds also differ from each other. The real world suffers accidental cruelty, such as the death of Mr. Koyasu's young son. The walled city, however, is organized around cruelty, such as routine mistreatment and the slaughter of beasts. People who enter that city are violently separated from their consciousness and memories, which they refer to as their shadows.
No matter where Dream Reader travels, people struggle to find love and happiness.
Transience is a motif of other recent post-pandemic work. Like Murakami, its authors mix time, place, realism and surrealism to explore the characters' journeys towards self-understanding.
In the collection of Sejal Shah “How to make your mother cry”, the characters search for their autonomous feminine self free from patriarchy. Imagination and fairy tales help them survive. Like Murakami, Shah plays with spatial context, writing in one story that “a train station became a chiropractor's office (everything was once something else).”
In “Maria Slechta”Mulberry Street Stories”, a neighborhood juxtaposes fantastical features, like a walking house, with ordinary cruelties, like white flight and urban blight. In one story, Mulberry Street is described as floating in space; “Untethered and unbalanced, the upper block maintained its tenuous position as it tended to tilt downward.” Big Wheels and children fleeing pit bulls fall over the edge, young residents waste time, while others can “jump over the chasm” with their “heart in their throat.”
And in “What Makes You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better” by Jody Hobbs Hesler, people create mental spaces to survive tragedy and discontent. In one story, “Alone,” a married mother longs to understand her neighbor's suicide as well as her life of loneliness. After his death, she enters her house and watches through her window as her young family searches for her. Later that night, in the bed she shares with her husband and children, she imagines being inside her neighbor's house: her portal to escape her own domestic situation.
As we contemplate social and ecological disasters, we need new ways to talk about what is real. Murakami writes more transparently about our contemporary moment toward the end of his latest novel in a reflection on the “pandemic of the soul.” Yellow Submarine Boy tells Dream Reader to “believe in the existence of his other self.”
“Your heart is… a bird,” he says. “The wall cannot stop your heart from flapping its wings.”
But Murakami never shows us how this belief in self changes the material conditions of both cities. We are left to imagine what will be next.
Jafa, the filmmaker, has said that artists do not have the responsibility to convince or explain. It is best to think of Murakami and the other writers as alchemists working with the substance of our current reality. What we do with the gold they conjure is up to us.
Renee Simms is an associate professor of African American studies at the University of Puget Sound and author of “Get to know behind Mars.”
