There’s a lot about Haruki Murakami’s latest novel that will sound familiar to readers of his work: an unusual other world that exists in parallel to the real world; a strange, walled town where people are cut off from their shadows; unicorns; dream readers. When I first read the summary for The City and Its Uncertain Walls without having any other context, I was like, “Is this Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but different?” In some ways, it is. In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, a man reminisces about a girl he fell in love with as a teenager, who once spun a story of a walled town where she claimed the real her resides and disappeared. He’s never really moved on from it. Then one day, he finds himself in the town.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland was Murakami’s first attempt to rewrite a novella he’d published years earlier. But he now feels that “the timing was off, that it was too soon then to do a rewrite,” he recently told The New Yorker. Some forty years later, he again returns to the concepts from that novella with The City and Its Uncertain Walls. “As the years went by, I understood that I wanted to make it a calmer, quieter type of story,” he told The New Yorker. And here we are.