The City and Its Uncertain Walls
A Novel
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4.1 • 34 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
• NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GlOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A REAL SIMPLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.
"Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction." —The New York Times • "More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world." —San Francisco Chronicle • "Murakami is masterful." —Los Angeles Times
We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.
Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world – a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.
"Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn't this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?” —Haruki Murakami, from the afterword
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A girl’s disappearance haunts the boy who loved her in a novel that blends mystery, science fiction, and magical realism into one stunning coming-of-age tale. Two teenagers are in love, but the girl claims her real self lives in a fantastical walled city filled with magical creatures and strange rules. When she tragically disappears, part of the boy wonders…did she find a way to go there? Years later, after the boy becomes a middle-aged man, he decides to find out. Haruki Murakami centers this tale around classic themes of aging, loneliness, and spiritual transcendence. The plot is simultaneously fast and slow, and the writing is both expansive and dense—all of which makes the whole thing feel like wandering through a beautiful dream. With lush, vivid imagery and enigmatic prose, The City and Its Uncertain Walls will leave you with a grand sense of wonder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Murakami (Killing Commendatore) unspools an intoxicating fantasy of a parallel world. The unnamed middle-aged narrator recounts how, at 17, he fell in love with a 16-year-old girl who told him of a walled city in which her "real" self lives. At her invitation he wills himself into this world and takes a job as a Dream Reader at a library where the shelves are stocked with dreams, which he describes as "echoes of the minds left behind by real people." The narrator then loses contact with the girl and the alternate world and embarks on an ordinary life, first as a businessman in Tokyo, then as head of a small library in an unnamed mountainous town. The ingenuity of Murakami's tale lies in the resonances he establishes between the two worlds through depictions of an assistant librarian who calls to mind the narrator's youthful girlfriend, a mentor who might be an elderly reflection of the narrator himself, and a 16-year-old boy who forms an obsessive interest in the narrator's descriptions of the walled city. Even as Murakami forges a bridge between the parallel universes, he artfully preserves the ambiguity at the heart of a question posed by the narrator: "Is this world inside the high brick wall? Or outside it?" It's an astonishing achievement.
Customer Reviews
READ ALL THE WAY THROUGH….
This is one to be read all the way through , without another book getting in the way. While it moves quickly, it also doesn’t move too quickly. While it appears somewhat repetitious, it reflects a repetitive routine life. Our walls we build lock us in to that repetitive life, lock us in to past dreams and don’t allow us to move on, keep shifting and thus making it hard to appreciate what we have and grow beyond the walls create fact from fiction despite all our knowledge. Guess you can tell from this there is much to walk away with from this gem. Allow it to happen. It’s a great book.
Magic realism? No…
Cliche riddled nonsense. Shadows, Kafka’s Castle monumentally ripped off.., coupled with old doppelgänger, multiverse ideas. This is not magic realism. Marquez’s “one hundred years of solitude” is MR… where did it go wrong from “wind up bird…” and “Norwegian wood”?
It’s ridiculous
I’ve always enjoyed Murakami’s writings, but reading this last one was a total waste of my time-he’s burned out.