‘The City and Its Uncertain Walls’: Haruki Murakami’s novel is pre-packaged for consumption

The most frustrating thing a writer can do to a reader is tell them, through so many words, that their reader is witless. Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls doesn’t let the reader serve themselves. It ties them to a spot and washes, peels, and stuffs sustenance right to their mouth. They can’t – and don’t – have to move so much as a finger. Entering the novel is like walking into a theme park designed after Murakami’s oeuvre, complete with a joyride that caricatures a plot, with teeny-tiny subplots that deflect from the larger premise of an isolated boy, now man, who fell in love with a girl who quite literally vanished. She didn’t even leave a note.

A city of words

Murakami’s unnamed narrator enters limbo after losing touch with his girlfriend, going through the motions of life, sequestering himself in the world of books. When they meet after their first encounter in an essay writing competition, she asks him to wait till she is ready to let him have “all of [her]” and also warns him that she is not the “real” her. She’s a shadow that the real her had to leave behind to enter the city with the walls,...

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