THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS by Haruki Murakami

5 stars

Another utterly brilliant novel by Murakami- which took him decades of reworking to finish and glowing with the maturity of his seasoned, deeply thought-provoking, philosophical and yes, at times unsettling, writing. What started 40 years ago as a short story has been expanded the universe of his novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

The worlds of life and death, reality and fantasy, play out in an enigmatic story of a 16-year-old boy whose first love vanishes without a trace and he quest in his fervent imagination to find her. He finds her in a walled city that they had dreamed up together, filled with dreams in eggs that need to be read, a fierce Gatekeeper and the requirement to live there that you must detach from your shadow and let it die. And of course, there resides his 16-year-old love, sadly with no memory of him. But he gets to spend every day beside her. Meanwhile shadows have distinct personalities and fight for their own survival warning that a person without a shadow is incomplete. The city’s wall has a mind of its own, moving to redefine the town’s borders and to separate it from the hard-edge reality of the world we know. The effect is both hallucinatory and other-worldly, compelling and baffling.

Eventually bounced against his will out of this imaginary city when he decides to save his shadow, the now adult man moves out of Tokyo leaving his job in book distribution to a small mountain village on a quest to become a librarian. Even more bizarre events transpire from there.

Murakami’s lifelong writing themes thread through this latest novel as well: favorite jazz, cats, and a protagonist who despite being completely average ends up having extraordinary experiences. He also rifts on Plato’s cave- questioning the very nature of what it is we take for “reality.” In Murakami’s universe of magic realism, our subconscious and imagination have as much claim to what is real as our consciousness.

Like all his amazing work, you end up both engaged and puzzled, challenged and unsettled, swept along in his sparse, poetic writing, pondering the meaning of life, and yearning for more.

Thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

Stacy DeBroff

Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of Mom Central.com and social and digital consultancy, Influence Central, is a social media strategist, attorney, and best-selling parenting author. A sought-after expert for national media, she trend-spots regularly with national brands and speaks frequently to national and international audiences on a wide range of subjects, including influencer marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, and consumer trends. A passionate cook, gardener, reader, and tennis player, she adores this new chapter of post-college-age parenting.