I have already read and appreciated several of Murakami’s books, including the novels Kafka on the Shore and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and short story collections Men Without Women and First Person Singular. I like his pleasant yet elegant writing style and his frequent plunges into surrealism. I was excited, therefore, when I heard that his new novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, had recently been published in English.

The novel is told in three parts. In the first part, the unnamed narrator begins by recounting a teenage love affair that he has with a mysterious girl who explains that she is, in fact, only a shadow and that her real persona lives in an enigmatic city inhabited by humans and unicorns, which is surrounded by an impenetrable wall. Years after the girl disappears, the narrator manages to reach the city and enter, but to be able to do so, his shadow has to be ripped away from him, as shadows are not allowed inside. His shadow, kept in a guard-post at the city gate, weakens day by day, and before it dies the narrator decides to help it escape.

Part two takes place in the world outside the city, where the narrator has resumed his life, but it is unclear, or at least never stated, whether it is the narrator himself or his shadow telling the story in this section. Part three returns to the city within the wall. I’m not really giving much away by sharing this bare-bones outline; there is plenty left to discover as you read, including the appearance of ghosts, the vital yet cryptic task of dream-reading, the shifting nature of the city’s surrounding walls, and the inexplicable disappearance of a young boy who can recall every word in every book he has ever read.

Murakami never clarifies the relationship between the so-called “real” world in which the narrator begins his tale and the walled city he is drawn to; he leaves it up to the reader to figure out. By way of explanation, near the end of part two the narrator has a conversation with a woman he is attracted to about magic realism, using Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an example. The woman says that “in his stories the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one, like that’s an ordinary, everyday thing.” She adds that “for Garcia Marquez himself it’s just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes those scenes the way he sees them.” I think that in this passage, Murakami is explaining the way he approaches his material, at least in this novel. The real and the imaginary mix and mingle so that they are difficult to differentiate.

I like Murakami’s voice. He has a gentle way of storytelling that is enchanting, and a deft method of inserting the unexpected in the midst of the mundane. He allows the story to unfold in a leisurely manner, which up to a point is acceptable. On the other hand, I feel that parts one and three are tightly written and compelling, while part two, which is by far the longest section in the book, does too much meandering. For whole chapters nothing really happens, and activities are repeated over and over. I think that if a couple hundred pages could have been edited out of the middle, the novel as a whole would have been stronger. Despite the slow pace, though, Murakami had already managed to hook me, and I hung on to find out what would happen in the end.

Would I recommend it? Sure, why not? As I said before, Murakami has an endearing style, and though sometimes I was frustrated that he didn’t just get on with the story, slow-paced Murakami is more entertaining than faster-paced most other writers.

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