Book: The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Author: Haruki Murakami
Published by: Harvill Secker
Price: Rs. 1,499
Haruki Murakami’s new novel, translated by Philip Gabriel, is actually an old one, now grown up and going through a mid-life crisis. The author’s signature love quest with the disappearing object of desire kicks off the tale. A socially awkward and isolated bookworm of seventeen meets and falls obsessively in love with a mysterious sixteen year old when both their essays win prizes in a school contest. She tells him that she is really a shadow and her real self, who lives in a walled town with horned beasts (later revealed as unicorns) guarded by a stern Gatekeeper, works in a library that holds dreams instead of books. He can be the Dream Reader there because he is specially qualified for the post. He faithfully inscribes every detail of the town as she describes it. Then she vanishes. Devastated, he nevertheless carries on with the rest of his life, searching unsuccessfully for her everywhere until the day he finds himself in the walled town that they had together talked into existence.
Later in the story, he speaks his secret at the grave of a person of fond memory. This is overheard by an adolescent, called the Yellow Submarine Boy. This alter-ego with miraculous reading powers makes his way to the city carrying an entire library’s worth of books in his head and the story ultimately binds the two in a complex entanglement. “The girl”, like Petrarch’s Laura, launches the hero into the narrative, but also like her Italian foremother, quietly fades away when the big games begin. She is replaced by “the woman”, who wears tight corsetry because it protects her from “all things hypothetical”. Both are fascinating characters in conception, but receive hardly any exploration. They are shadows of the narrator’s multiple selves, echoing his prudishness and lust, his shame and pride, and his speaking and reading back to himself. Let us not call this misogyny, but let us also not call this love.
In a rare Afterword, Murakami writes the story of the book’s origin. Not exactly an apologia, this brief explanation is perhaps more striking than the novel itself. The author describes how, although first published as a novella with the same title in 1980, he “wasn’t satisfied with it”. In trying to rewrite it, he’d produced the very different, Tanika Prize-winning “double feature”, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985). The original City had nevertheless stuck like a fishbone in his throat until, after a hiatus of forty years, the coronavirus forced the real world into isolation and the author inside its uncertain walls.
Forty years, incidentally, is also the age of the first-person narrator of the present novel. The structure of the tale is spatially determined — the locations shift between the protagonists’ adolescence in Tokyo, the titular walled city, and a remote mountain town in which he finds himself the head librarian. The time of narration remains the middle-aged present for our unnamed hero who must come to terms with the inexorable fact that time is also running out for him: “Was I going to spend the rest of my life like this, all alone, with no one else beside me?” The motif of a person’s shadow growing self-aware and apart from the body, strongly reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1847 short story, “The Shadow”, is woven throughout the narrative. Through the narrator’s extensive, and somewhat boring, ruminations about the nature of time and human (read well-read, middle-aged, masculine) consciousness, of which the walking shadow is a symbolic function, it seems that reality is nothing but what we tell ourselves is real.
This is hardly saying much. All of Murakami’s work is thematically based upon similar concerns. It does not help that the author himself, citing Jorge Luis Borges, notes how there are “basically a limited number of stories one writer can relate in this lifetime” and all that can be done is to “change the approach and methods as we go, and rewrite them in all sorts of ways”. This is such a truism that the internet records many re-illustrations of Grant Snider’s notorious ‘Haruki Murakami Bingo’ board. This comforting familiarity obviously cannot offer challenges and provoke the intellect. This is bland fare served in bloodless translation and peppered with redundant constructions such as “slung a leather shoulder bag over her shoulder”.
But perhaps we should not be looking for surprises in the first place. As long as trademark Murakami delivers on obscurity of philosophy, opacity of symbolism, high-sounding platitude, extensive book and music references (Chet Baker, The Russian Five, the Bible, to wit), and deadpan reportage (for does that not often hide genuine emotion?), we have had our daily dose of sophisticated Japanese profundity. Much like stepping into the safe embrace of a paternalistic god whose meaning we may not really understand but always trust in its worth, we read and are soothed.
