The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Starred review from August 15, 2024
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.

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Starred review from September 1, 2024
Two teens in love share a parallel world through storytelling. The girl insists she's the shadow of her "real" self, which exists in "that town surrounded by a wall" in which the boy is a Dream Reader. The girl soon vanishes. The boy, now a middle-aged man, falls into a hole and transports to that town, where he finds the girl, still 16. He is, indeed, the Dream Reader, she his assistant. He somehow returns to his real world, quits his job, and becomes the head librarian at a small library. His closest companion there is dead; his most mysterious patron is a teen savant in a Yellow Submarine parka. "What is real, and what is not?" Murakami's latest arrives in the U.S. translated by Gabriel, one of his anointed translators, with Murakami's intimate afterword elucidating the narrative's 44-year-old history from a 1980 novella, The City, and Its Uncertain Walls, that he "regretted publishing." He transformed it into Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) but four decades later began another "coexist[ing]" story which became this "rewritten (or perhaps completed)" novel. 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.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: News of a forthcoming Murakami novel will rally literary fiction readers.

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October 1, 2024

Bestselling and multi-award-winning Murakami, who most recently won the Cino Del Duca World Prize, offers his first novel in six years. It revisits the otherworld known as the City, which was first introduced in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The story is being described as a quest, a parable, and an ode to books and libraries. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from November 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.