Book review: Brilliance that defies simple categorisation

'The City and Its Uncertain Walls' is a sheer delight to read: Puzzling, surprising and even at times hallucinatory, like a Hans Escher engraving

Japanese author Haruki Murakami spent three years rewriting his novella. File picture: Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images

• The City and Its Uncertain Walls 
• Haruki Murakami 
• Translated by Philip Gabriel 
• Vintage, €27.99

After six years of silence, the master of gently melancholic novels blending realism and low-key fantasy/mystery is back with a superb novel, a rewrite of an early novella originally published in 1980.

Back then, Murakami had published just one novel, and was still running a jazz bar in Tokyo, as he recounts in a short afterword. 

After 40 years as an international best-seller, at the start of 2020, Murakami, then 71, decided that he now had the skills to do justice to the underdeveloped early novella. 

He wrote full-time for three years, seldom leaving his house, and here is the result, 449 pages of intriguing story.

It opens with a typical Murakami scenario, a good-looking young couple who have fallen in love, getting to know each other: 

“At that time neither you nor I had names. The radiant feelings of a seventeen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old on the grass of a riverbank, in the summer twilight, were the only things that mattered. Stars would soon be twinkling above us, and they had no names either…”

The girl, who remains nameless, is describing the town that she comes from. It is neither big nor small and is surrounded by a high wall. 

She explains that is where “the real me” lives: “The me here with you now isn’t the real me. It’s only a stand-in. Like a wandering shadow.”

A feature of the novel is the way that it quietly alternates realism with fantasy world, whose other-worldly logic becomes more complex as the dual stories progress.

The young lovers remain chaste, although there are hugs and kisses, and after only one summer they part.

She warns him that if they meet again, she will not remember him.

The town she describes resembles a medieval engraving, with watchtowers along the tall walls, from which trumpets sound at dusk, a signal for the unicorns to leave: 

“…the beasts’ bodies were covered with a shiny, golden coat of fur. The single horns in their foreheads were sharp and white…”

Eventually he manages to join her there, where he works in the library as a “Dream Reader”. He takes time to adjust to his new life: 

“I sat in the chair and untangled my consciousness from the cage of my physical self, so that I could run freely in a broad meadow of thoughts, like a romping dog off the leash.”

He has a leisurely start to his day, walking to the library in the early evening, where she prepares a thick herbal tea to help his dream reading.

But he has left his shadow at the gate, as a condition of entry, and chooses to retrieve it rather than let it die.

With a jolt, he is back in Tokyo, a middle-aged man working at a job in publishing. He chooses to move to a small country town and work as a librarian.

Much detail, often quite dull, is given about his life in this peaceful rural place.

You need patience to enjoy the quieter, realistic chapters as well as the more lively fantastical ones. This is not standard magical realism, nor is it surrealism or speculative fiction. It defies categorisation.

It is often beautiful in a quiet poetic way, without being either symbolic or metaphorical.

Above all, it is a sheer delight to read: Puzzling, surprising and even at times hallucinatory, like a Hans Escher engraving.

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