Why nobody writes like Haruki Murakami

The Japanese writer’s 15th novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, follows a young couple who can only meet in an illusory library

5/5
A boy and a girl fall in love; they are both teenagers. Their romance, depicted in the opening section of Haruki Murakami’s 15th novel, is chaste and idyllic. It even has the quality of a fable: “At that time neither you nor I had names. The radiant feelings of a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old on the grass of a riverbank, in the summer twilight, were the only things that mattered.” The language, in Philip Gabriel’s translation, veers towards cliché: yet its purpose is to put the reader in the idealised world this pair are creating for themselves.
The girl tells the boy, our narrator, that her true self lives in a town with high walls. A river runs through it, and within the town there is a library. There the boy can become a Dream Reader, his work to sift through old dreams that have been collected on the shelves. This is, in fact, the only way he can truly be with the girl – for their actual bodies are illusions. Yet he can feel the slender straps of her dress as he puts his arm around her shoulder; and even though it’s clearly in another world, the boy finds himself able to go to this library. The story is already shuttling between what we think of as “reality” and “unreality”.
Murakami might not approve of that distinction. He has always allowed that the imaginative and the spiritual cannot be easily separated from the tangible; in Western tradition, this kind of writing sometimes is called “magical realism”, an unsatisfactory and often dismissive term, insinuating that the author considers the rules by which the rest of us are bound not to apply to him.
Speaking to The New Yorker’s Deborah Treisman in 2019, Murakami drew attention to how his work is described. “I can’t always see the borderline between the unreal world and the realistic world,” he said. “So, in many cases, they’re mixed up. In Japan, I think that other world is very close to our real life, and if we decide to go to the other side it’s not so difficult. I get the impression that in the Western world it isn’t so easy to go to the other side; you have to go through some trials to get to the other world. But, in Japan, if you want to go there, you go there.”
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a book that allows you to go there. It began life as a long story published in a magazine in 1980, just a year after Murakami’s first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, appeared in Japan. He was never happy with the story, but it haunted him, and in 2020, during the Covid pandemic, he felt able to return to it. Like much of his writing, it explores missed connections, regrets, disappearances; what it means to be alive, and how we’re remembered when we’re dead. There are aspects of this novel that could almost be called “cosy”, not least because so much of it takes place in libraries, and what could be more beloved by the readers who will hold this book in their hands? But the comfort offered has a dark heart.
Recounting the plot doesn’t serve this novel well. Let’s say: the girl disappears from the boy’s life; the boy grows into a man. He never marries. The lost girl remains his ideal. Eventually he leaves Tokyo for a job as a librarian in Fukushima prefecture – in what we understand to be a “real” library, in a “real” place – where he’s taken under the wing of an older librarian, Mr Koyasu. Mr Koyasu, however, turns out to be dead, which is less of an obstacle to the story than it might sound. Eventually a kind of bridge is built between the imaginary library of the narrator’s past and the actual library of his present: “Everything is overwritten, renewed. That’s the world we belong to now.”
If you’re a novice Murakami reader – and there must be some out there – allow for the quietness, and the deliberate repetitiveness (the narrator frequently reminds us of the girl’s and boy’s ages), of its opening. What is quietly miraculous is how the novel concretises as it builds, the dreamscape becoming the world we, and the narrator, inhabit. The smallest details remind us of the mythic nature of the universe the author creates: when the weather warms the narrator sheds his heavy wool coat for a lighter one: “It was a worn-out coat someone had probably worn for years but, oddly enough, fit like a bespoke jacket.” So it is with this tale: what at first seems strange becomes familiar and true, a comfortable place to inhabit.
One of the reasons Murakami inspires such devotion is the porous nature of his work. Fables allow space for readers to place themselves within the text, to bring their own visions into the author’s imagination. Murakami writes with a light touch: but his country’s painful history is conjured here too. Next year is the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on mainland Japan, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it’s hard to imagine how any country could truly recover from such terrifying wounds.
For this reader, at least, The City and Its Uncertain Walls seemed littered with images from that tragedy, which has been visited only upon Japan. There are clocks without hands, shadows detached from the people to whom they belong – the intense heat of the atomic bomb left only dark shadows where people or objects had been – and snow that falls like ash. The choice of Fukushima makes reference to another, more recent nuclear disaster. Even the desire to shuttle between worlds speaks, to me, of an imagination fractured by the deployment of those terrible weapons. Others may perceive this novel and its motifs very differently; but that is high praise. The greatest books, after all, are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami’s narrator enters his mysterious libraries.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is published by Harvill Secker at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books