Literature: Happy Birthday, Haruki Murakami: A wall that moves

Haruki Murakami is a gifted prolific writer. The Japanese writer has been publishing novels, stories, non-fiction books, essays and sometimes autobiographical works for over 40 years, sometimes in very voluminous volumes. No other Asian author has been as present on the Western book market for decades as Murakami, who was born in Kyoto 75 years ago today and lives in a small town near Tokyo. The German translation of his new novel “The City and its Uncertain Wall” is coming out just in time for his birthday. This 640-page opus was created during the Corona lockdown, says Murakami, who uses it to create a wide arc through his literary work full of surrealistic magic.

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Like his fantastic novel “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” published in 1985, his new work is based on one of the first stories that Murakami published in a Japanese literary magazine at the end of the 70s and with which he was not really satisfied. “This text has always bothered me, even disturbed me, like a small bone stuck in my throat,” he writes in the afterword. And so this “little bone” became a novel with 600 pages.

It’s about a man who works as a dream reader in the magical and nameless city with unicorns and a strict gatekeeper that we know from “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” The first-person narrator, who is also nameless, drifts from our reality into the fantastic city and back again. As always in Murakami’s prose, it is about the loss of loved ones, sexual desire, buried memories from adolescence, dreams and the eternal struggle to plumb the barely nameable depths of the human soul. As usual, all of this is written in astonishingly simple and extremely emotional prose, the narrative pull of which almost gives you the impression that you are experiencing the story yourself – despite all the unrealistic fantasy. Because Murakami’s novels, as magical and surreal as they are, always have something incredibly down-to-earth and ultimately calming, even when magic and ghosts appear in them.

There is also such a ghost in “The City and its Uncertain Wall”: a friendly, wise, old man who supports the narrator. He helps him find his way from one reality to the other. Because the narrator’s great love lives in the mysterious city. This young woman suddenly disappeared from Tokyo, where he fell in love with her as a 17-year-old. But one day, in his mid-forties, he ends up in the surreal city. It is by no means paradise, even if there are unicorns grazing in the meadows there. Because in the harsh winters, these magical animals die off en masse. There are no other animals, no music, just withdrawn residents walking through the streets. No one who lives there has a shadow. But the lover from her youth is there. She works in the library where the narrator must read old dreams every night after undergoing painful eye surgery. He is the only one who remembers the real world beyond the “uncertain wall.” This structure is described as “uncertain” because it is constantly changing, unlike the surreal world that surrounds it.

Murakami has once again created a fascinating psychological development novel – with its typical motifs of city dweller loneliness, lots of jazz music, romantic encounters and cooking together. The surreal world into which the first-person narrator drifts and then disappears again can be read as an allegory of the unconscious. How much access do you have to it? And how much can you shape reality? What significance do dreams, fears, resentments and hopes play?

All of this could easily come from a kitchen psychology kit, but Haruki Murakami dramaturgically implements it as a gripping stylistic work of art without drifting into the banal. The Japanese author, who ran a jazz bar in Tokyo in his youth and has a great fondness for magical realism and US literature and pop music, has managed this balancing act again and again for decades.

Haruki Murakami: The City and its Uncertain Wall. A.d. Yep. v. Ursula Gräfe. Dumont, 640 p., hardcover, €34.

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