Since 1979, Haruki Murakami has written more than a dozen imaginative novels dealing with the realm of reality. He said that he tends to incorporate strange events that happen while he is writing into real stories. Film producer Arthur Jafa has described a similar process of creating energy by placing dissonant scenes at a distance. In Murakami’s novel, this might look like a character stuck in Tokyo traffic one moment and arriving in a parallel universe with two moons the next.
But the reality of 2024 feels different from 2018, when we last got a book from Murakami. Since then, we have faced deadly pandemics, historic social protests, the escalating ravages of climate change, the resurgence of reactionary politics and the outbreak of war. Into this real dystopia comes Murakami’s latest novel.
“Uncertain Cities and Walls” has the characteristic features of the author. There are love stories and references to jazz, the Beatles and cats. There is a young man (called the Yellow Submarine Boy) who is intellectually gifted and socially different. Murakami develops the strange details in the interesting way we expect.
But what does his latest novel talk about now? Is it, as the publisher suggests, “a parable about this strange post-pandemic era”?
Murakami hails from Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan with historic cultural institutions. In July 1945, the US removed Kyoto from its list of targets for atomic destruction. Instead of bombing Kyoto next month, we destroyed Nagasaki. Murakami was born four years after the holocaust.
When he was 2 years old, his family moved to the port city of Kobe. He said his proximity to the water and the diverse immigrant population that passed through him shaped his writing. Other possible influences include his father, who was a professor of literature, and his experiences growing up in the 1960s, a time of revolutionary imagination.
When Murakami sat down to expand “Uncertain Cities and Walls,” first published as a novel in 1980, he was 71 and the world was on the brink of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I started writing this novel in March 2020,” Murakami says on the back of the book, “just as the coronavirus began to rage in Japan, and I finished almost three years later.” He added that he rarely left the house during this time, writing every day.
The context of the pandemic is mainly at the end of the novel. However, it’s a start for die-hard Murakami fans.
It was then that the Dream Reader, the narrator, fell in love with a girl whose memory would haunt him for the rest of his life. He told me about the city he said he lived in. Surrounded by high walls, there is a river, gatekeepers, magical animals and a library filled with egg-shaped dreams to read.
Soon, the girl tells the narrator about this town, she disappeared. Unable to find him, he became sad. He floated through youth without inspiration, falling into a repetitive and boring work routine. Many years later, a ghost named Mr. Koyasu said, “When you feel pure and unblemished love, it’s like a part of your heart that has been irradiated, burned with love.”
Heartbreak leads the narrator to the walled city. After he arrives, a gatekeeper injures his eye, separates him from the shadows and gives him the library’s Dream Reader.
Over the course of the novel, which spans three decades, the narrator travels between an imagined city and the real world, searching for an elusive human connection. The details of two worlds blur together. That’s how time is. Both places have libraries with underground rooms and wood stoves. And people in both places struggle to understand themselves because of the emotional walls they build.
But the world is different too. The real world experiences unintended atrocities such as the death of Mr. Koyasu’s young son. However, the walled city was organized around atrocities such as misbehavior and killing of animals. Those who enter the city are violently separated from consciousness and memories, called shadows.
No matter where the Dream Reader travels, people struggle to find love and happiness.
Transience is another recent post-pandemic work motif. Like Murakami, the author delves into time, place, realism and surrealism to explore the character’s journey to self-understanding.
In Sejal Shah’s collection “How to Make Your Mother Cry“The characters seek to be autonomous women free from patriarchy. Imagination and fairy tales help them survive. Like Murakami, Shah plays with the spatial context, writing in one of the stories that “the train station becomes the chiropractor’s office (Everything else is -).”
In Mary Slechta”Mulberry Street Stories“An environment juxtaposes fantastic features, such as walking houses, with ordinary cruelty, such as white planes and urban blight. In one story, Mulberry Street is described as floating in space; “Untered and unbalanced, the upper block holds a tenuous position with a tendency to tilt downward .” The Big Wheel and children running from the pit bulls fell on the edge, the young residents lost time while others were able to “jump over the cliff” with their “heart in their throats.”
And in Jody Hobbs Hesler, “What Makes You Think You’re Considered More,” people carve out mental space to survive tragedy and dissatisfaction. In one story, “Alone,” a married mother wants to know about her neighbor’s suicide and her lonely life. After her death, he went into her house and looked out the window as her family searched for her. At night, in the bed he shares with his wife and children, he imagines being in a neighbor’s house – a portal to escape from his own domestic situation.
As we look at social and ecological disasters, we need new ways of talking about what is real. Murakami writes most transparently about the contemporary moment at the end of his latest novel in his reflections on the “pandemic of the soul.” The Yellow Submarine Boy tells the Dream Reader to “believe in the existence of another self.”
“Your heart is … a bird,” he said. “Walls can’t stop your heart from beating its wings.”
But Murakami never shows how his beliefs about himself change the material conditions of any one city. We are left to imagine what comes next.
Jafa, the filmmaker, says that artists have no responsibility to convince or explain. It’s better to think of Murakami and other writers as alchemists working at the core of our current reality. What we do with the gold they conjure is up to us.
Renee Simms is a professor of African American studies at the University of Puget Sound and the author of “Meet Beyond Mars.”
