63 pages • 2 hours read
Haruki MurakamiThe City and Its Uncertain Walls
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami is an acclaimed Japanese author born in Kyoto in 1949. He has published 19 books of fiction, including novels and short story collections, as well as 5 books of nonfiction. He has won many awards, both in Japan and internationally for such books as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) and Kafka on the Shore (2006). Murakami’s introduction to writing was unique, his career beginning through inspiration at a baseball game: “David Hilton, an American, came to bat. According to the oft-repeated story, in the instant that he hit a double, Murakami suddenly realized that he could write a novel. He went home and began writing that night” (“Author.” Haruki Murakami). This first novel was Hear the Wind Sing (1979), the first book in a loose trilogy that culminates in A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), which won Murakami international acclaim. Murakami’s style is often associated with magical realism, as he incorporates the fantastical and unreal into many of his novels, analyzing the complex interrelation between the real and the imagined. Murakami’s emphasis on memory and its impact on reality is featured heavily in many of his novels, including The City and Its Uncertain Walls. The inclusion of an alternate reality as a setting is also frequently utilized in his works, such as in 1Q84 (2009) and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985).
Literary Context: The City, and Its Uncertain Walls and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
The City and Its Uncertain Walls, published in 2023, is Haruki Murakami’s 15th novel and shares a strong connection to two of his previous works. It is closely related to Murakami’s fourth novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which features the same walled-in town, though it takes a more science-fiction approach, with a dual narrative. Murakami explains the journey of writing The City and Its Uncertain Walls in the Afterword of the novel: “The core of the novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls lies in a novella (or long short story) I published in 1980 in the literary magazine Bungakukai entitled The City, and Its Uncertain Walls […]. I published it in the magazine but wasn’t satisfied with it” (447). Murakami’s relationship with his novella was uncertain, and he never pushed for it to be translated or published in a collection. Years later, he decided to rewrite the story in novel form, and produced Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
The novel follows a protagonist whose subconscious is an encryption key. He learns that he will soon enter the world in his own subconscious. Elsewhere, in the walled-in town in his mind, the narrator becomes a Dream Reader. Murakami sees this novel as adding to the world his novella created: “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was one response to the original story, but I thought a different form of response might be worth doing, too. Not overwriting the earlier work but instead creating a story that coexisted with it, so that the two complimented each other” (Murakami, Haruki, “Afterword.” The City and It’s Uncertain Walls. 19 Nov. 2024). He once again revisits the novella to explore the world he created from a different angle. In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the walled-in town and its rules still apply. However, this novel takes an approach more focused on magical realism. It contains a sense of mystery and explores questions of consciousness, love, and reality from a more philosophical standpoint.
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By Haruki Murakami
