Publishers Weekly
★ 11/18/2024
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. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
It is with unabashed joy that I am here to report: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Murakami’s first novel in six years, is also one of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling. The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a paean to books, reading, and libraries, an investigation into the relationship between romance and realism, and a timely fable about how relationships, societies, and communities both protect themselves against threats and foster beauty and truth.”
—Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe
“Spellbinding. . . . [An] oddly irresistible fable. . . . [The] eerie landscape of snows, forests and torrents is beautifully evoked as Mr. Murakami the seasoned storyteller of loss, loneliness and passing time takes charge. The action dawdles, then leaps, with a trademark blend of soap opera and sublimity. In deadpan, slow-burn, quietly hypnotic prose, delicately conveyed in Mr. Gabriel’s translation, our narrator settles into a becalmed life as guardian of the small-town library stacks. . . . Mr. Murakami understands these parallel territories of the mind not simply as escapism but as a precious refuge for those who ‘had never put down roots in this world.’ He conjures the charm, and also the harm, of all-consuming obsessions. In the perfect walled town, no cats prowl, because ‘nothing unneeded’ can exist there.”
—Boyd Tonkin, The Wall Street Journal
“[Murakami’s] imagination is one of a kind, and his blend of pop culture, postmodernism and Japanese mythology is a wholly unique contribution to literature.”
—Jonathan Russell Clark, The Washington Post
"Mysterious, illusive… there is something about the way [Murakami] writes that is so captivating.”
—Rumaan Alam, The Today Show
"Ghostbustlingly alive. I was moved by [Murakami’s] portrait of impossible loss, how it can carve within us a Stygian underworld to which we are always being summoned. I even interpreted Murakami’s stinting on fictional norms as an attempt to more directly represent the self-exiling quality of melancholic grief.”
—Junot Diaz, New York Times
"As we stare down social and ecological disasters, we need new ways to talk about what is real. Murakami writes most transparently about our contemporary moment toward the end of his latest novel in a reflection on the ‘pandemic of the soul.”
—Renee Sims, Los Angeles Times
★ “Astonishing, puzzling, and hallucinatory as only Murakami can be, and one of his most satisfying tales.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ "The ingenuity of Murakami’s tale lies in the resonances he establishes between the two worlds…It’s an astonishing achievement."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
★ “Murakami fans, of course, will appreciate his iconic tropes—lost love, loneliness, missing women, and other realities—along with his comforting leitmotifs, namely cats, whiskey, jazz and classical music, and beloved books. In Murakami’s multiverses, as always, fascination dominates.”
— Booklist (starred review)
★ “In his trademark assured, graceful prose, Murakami has produced a work of tremendous ambition that on a sentence-by-sentence level feels like sitting down with a friend tohear them tell a very strange story. It’s another masterwork from one of our finest living novelists, and a must-read for Murakami devotees.”
—Book Page (starred review)
★ “At times a meditation on romance, reality vs. fantasy, ghosts, and the power of written words, this metaphysical novel examines the questionable value of timekeeping while thoroughly exploring unconditional love, self-imposed constraints, and deaths of one’s body and soul.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
Library Journal
★ 10/01/2024
The latest work from award-winning Murakami (Novelist as a Vocation) transports readers to a small town where residents have lost their own shadows, clocks have no hands, and the high wall surrounding the community can move and change its boundaries. A young man infatuated with a 16-year-old girl narrates. With the girl's help, he becomes a "dream reader" in a library without books or textual materials. He explores different realities as he delves into the dreams he experiences while reading. In his mid-40s, he finally finds a fulfilling position as head librarian in a rural area many miles away. Along a walking path between work, home, and the local cemetery, he frequents a coffee shop and befriends its owner. When he stops by one evening to have dinner with the coffee shop owner, she has just finished reading Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. That magical realism tale sheds a floodlight of insight into the narrator's mind, just as Murakami's book, a masterpiece, will with readers. VERDICT At times a meditation on romance, reality vs. fantasy, ghosts, and the power of written words, this metaphysical novel examines the questionable value of timekeeping while thoroughly exploring unconditional love, self-imposed constraints, and deaths of one's body and soul.—Lisa Rohrbaugh
DECEMBER 2024 - AudioFile
This audiobook defies easy labels, and narrator Brian Nishii is well suited to this type of material. His soft voice assumes an earnest, intense air as he follows the unnamed narrator through an alternate world. The plot is ethereal and fantastical, and the dreamy tone Nishii adopts seems appropriate as the narrator's thoughts meander. Lost love, exiled shadows, dream libraries, and coconut trees--Nishii's gentle, often hesitant, voice strolls among images both realistic and magical. For some, this lengthy performance may be too soft focused and slow. Nishii does a fine job, and it's up to the listener to decide whether the story offers enough in return. For Murakami devotees, this should be an exceptional listening experience, with plenty of sonic space to embrace the meditative. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-07-11
Another beguilingly enigmatic tale from Murakami, complete with jazz, coffee, Borgesian twists, the Beatles, and other trademark motifs.
In what is in many ways a bookend to1Q84, Murakami blends science fiction, gothic novel, noir mystery, horror (think Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s filmPulse), and coming-of-age story. His protagonist and narrator, as the novel opens, is a 17-year-old boy aswoon in love with a 16-year-old girl. “At that time neither you nor I had names,” he sighs, and when the girl slips away, he knows too little about her to find her. Before that, though, she transports him to a walled city that’s not on any map: “Not everyone can enter. You need special qualifications to do that.” Both of them have those qualifications, the young man filling the urgently needed role of a reader of dusty and long-backlogged dreams. The girl moves on, the boy becomes a middle-aged man, and back in the real world where “silence and nothingness, as always, were my constant companions,” he abandons Tokyo for a little mountain town to become its librarian, curating real books, not dreams. There he encounters two otherworldly characters, one a neurodivergent teen, Yellow Submarine Boy, who memorizes every book he reads, whatever the subject. The other—well, as he explains, “without hesitation, I’d say that although it’s rather dated and convenient, you could call me a ghost.” Both characters point in their own ways to a fleeting world where all that matters, in the end, is love—and where love is always just out of reach. It’s an elegant fable that deftly weaves ordinary reality—“something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives”—with a shadow world that is at once eerie and beautiful.
Astonishing, puzzling, and hallucinatory as only Murakami can be, and one of his most satisfying tales.