This was beautifully written story. I think fans of the Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern will like this one.

Welcome back to the "end of the world"!

I have read the majority of Murakami's bibliography, and was deeply excited about The City and Its Uncertain Walls, his first full-length novel in several years. This novel, is unmistakably Murakami. Even ignoring the purposeful similarities to Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World (this is a partial re-exploration of the same universe), this is the Murakami-est Murakami to have ever Murakami-ed.

We are taken through an ode to magical realism, as the middle-aged narrator recounts his high-school romance, and the insurmountability of finding that love again. Through this journey where fantasy and reality are blurred, our narrator finds himself in a city with ever evolving walls, separated from his shadow, and working with his (still high-school aged) former girlfriend in a dream library. When his shadow falls ill and the narrator agrees to help his shadow escape to save his (its?) life, we're tumbled back into the real world where the narrator serves as head librarian in a small town. As he takes on the role of head librarian, the barrier between the walled city and the real world seem ever thinner.

Is our narrator the shadow? Is his 'real self' still in the city? Who is real and who is the mere shadow? What parts do we cull to exist in society? Murakami masterfully creates a dreamlike world where we explore the sense of self, the human psyche, unresolved emotions, and the hidden recesses of the mind. The narrator navigates these uncertain walls, as we begin to question how we build our own walls in our perception of the world around us, and our recollections.

Personally, perhaps selfishly, I had read Novelist as a Vocation earlier this year, and found more than a few similarities between a younger Murakami and the first-person Narrator. In concert with the fact that the idea for this universe first showed up in a magazine and was later expanded upon to become Hard Boiled Wonderland, it made me read with the assumption that this concept of duality of identity is something Murakami has chewed on for quite a long time.

I enjoyed this book, and felt like it scratched an itch that only Murakami can truly fill. That said, it's not his best work, nor my favorite of his works, and isn't what I would recommend someone to start with if they were Murakami-curious. The pacing is slow and meandering, like a rather lazy, diaphanous train of thought, but suited to the style of story. If you want to feel like you're soaking in a slow book, and comfortable with magical realism, I'd definitely recommend!

I'll be re-reading this one soon, though perhaps will pick up its counterpart in Hard Boiled Wonderland first, to refresh my memory! The City and Its Uncertain Walls comes out in English in November, I received an electronic advanced reader copy from NetGalley :)

I'm a huge Murakami fan, and the highest compliment I could possibly give is that this is a quintessential Murakami book. Fascinating, weird, somehow complex yet also wildly readable, it takes the reader in a million different directions all at once. There is no blueprint for his works, but there is a feel and a vibe that he consistently nails every single time he publishes another story. In my eyes, he can do no wrong.

Thank you netgalley for giving me ARC access!

3.5 ⭐️ (rounded down bc the ending annoyed me)

I loved the prose of this book and whole chapters felt like poetry, props to the translators for doing such a great job. The plot was pretty confusing at times with plot twists not really being very surprising. I do wish we had gotten a little more resolution for all the different characters but this seemed like the kind of story to not wrap things up neatly. I do think the female characters didn't do much besides provide a pillar for the male main characters. There were multiple love interests that felt like their entire purpose in the story was to be tragic and beautiful, there was some effort to make them dynamic but not nearly as much as I would have liked in a book with so many words dedicated to the sounds a fireplace makes.

I would recommend this to people who really want a challenging read that makes you think and leaves you pondering it after you set it down.

Not my favorite from this author, but it does have some of the usual interesting outlooks and opinions about life in general we've come to expect from Murakami.
I just found however the babbling parts overshadowing everything else and never really getting to the meaning of some of the long-winded tangents.

Love the magical realism, love the writing style. It was hard to keep up with at times and I’m still not quite sure I understand it all. It’s one of those books that take a couple of reads to get the full beauty of the story.

I've never read anything by Murakami before, so I had no idea what to expect. I think I had him mentally confused with Ishiguro. This came as a wonderful surprise: it's a ghost story, it's a love story, it's a coming-of-age story, and it's magical realism. It's centered on a fictional town in a world where dreams and unicorns are real, and the people who live in both worlds. It's filled with allusions to the Beatles, jazz, Russian music, and much more, and every character is, in their own way, quite endearing. The whole book feels dreamlike, and simultaneously accessible and profound.

The best way I can describe it is to say it's like Mieville, Borges, Rushdie, and Gaiman rolled into one. And it doesn't get any better than that, does it?

As Murakami explains in the afterword, this is a retelling and expansion of a novella he published early on in his writing days, before he had the skills to tell the story the way he would have liked to. He attempted this retelling with Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but still wasn't satisfied. The story has a lot of the usual Murakami greatness/characters/quirks that fans will enjoy. The basic premise seems particularly slippery in this one, though. There's the idea of oneself and one's shadow as two beings able to be separated and, on occasion, recombined. The idea of being spirited away. The nature of consciousness comes up, as well as the soul. Life after death. The power of belief and conviction. Hemingway and Borges get a mentions, as well as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The nature of time, and timelessness.

There's a lot here, and I didn't even touch on the actual setting, with the real world and the city, which can be magically accessed by some, but not all.

Murakami is 75 and this felt to me like the work of someone trying to tie up some ideas and concepts that he's held and worked on through a lifetime of writing. It will be interesting to see if he writes another novel after this and, if so, if there's a shift, as this one felt like a completion of sorts.

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the advanced readers copy!

Haruki Murakami’s latest novel is one of the most thought-provoking I’ve read. In these pages, we meet a man whose name we never get to know, which seems fitting, since this character feels that he does not know who he is. As a teenager, this main protagonist meets and falls in love with a girl, who is also never named. Together, they dream up a town that is surrounded by a high wall and populated with people who have been permanently separated from their shadows. His girlfriend informs him that she herself is just a shadow of her real self, who lives inside that walled town.

At this point, I started to expect a fairy tale infused with magical realism. However, the narrative became something more complicated. There are many issues to mull over here, and it’s hard to know where to begin.

Eventually, when the main character finds his way into this walled town, he experiences its many quirks. For instance, there are the town walls themselves: they do not stay in a fixed position. Also, the clocks have no hands. At first, I suspected that this was all a dream, and that it’s a statement about how reality is up for interpretation and perhaps there is no such thing as time. Later, it becomes apparent that this is not simply a dream, that the protagonist must choose his reality for himself, and also believe in his own existence.

Many events take place in this novel, and there is much to ponder. Actually, I haven’t stopped pondering, and will not be forgetting this story anytime soon. It’s a most intriguing read. Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and Netgalley for providing me the chance to read this in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you Netgalley for the arc of this book!

Not to offend the literary baddies, but this is my first Murakami read. I know, I know....the horror. His reputation is about as widely known as his backlist is long. And it was always a wee bit intimidating. I tried, thats all I can say



DNF

Lovely, rich and dreamy.
An ode to previous works
and yet new, if slow.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I write haiku reviews but am happy to provide more feedback.

The long-awaited new novel from Haruki Murakami, his first in six years, revisits a Town his readers will remember, a place where a Dream Reader reviews dreams and where our shadows become untethered from our selves. A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these strange post-pandemic times,

Murakami's latest work dives deep into the surreal and introspective worlds he is known for, blending reality and imagination in a way that feels both familiar and utterly new. The novel’s intricate narrative explores the fluidity of truth and identity, making readers question the very nature of reality.

This highly anticipated novel promises to be a thought-provoking journey that reflects the complexities of our times, wrapped in Murakami's signature poetic and enigmatic style. Whether you're a long-time fan or new to his work, *The City and Its Uncertain Walls* is a must-read that will leave you pondering long after the final page.

Haruki Murakami is one of the most interesting writers sharing stories right now. I enjoyed and appreciated the physical and emotional architecture of this story, the turns of words and plot, and the masterful crafting of characters:

Thanks to Haruki Murakami; Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor; and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader Copy of this book in exchange for a honest review.

This book reminded me of a river as it moved deliberately towards the end with its intertwined stories and tributaries of ideas that join the story. The concept of a library of old dreams was very intriguing as were the overall challenges of what reality really is, and does time really matter?

The book includes an afterward by the author where he describes the background of the story and some of the concepts addressed within it. Not a book for action fans, but a good choice for those who want a well written story that will challenge your thinking on what we call reality.

Haruki Murakami's newest novel is wonderful! The fictional city behind the wall, the line between real and imaginary worlds, the questions that the characters struggle to answer and understand...this book will draw you in with the very first lines! The City and It's Uncertain Walls is a revision/second future of a short story that Murakami wrote many years ago (and has wanted to rewrite almost since the short story was released). It is magical realism at its very best!

Hey guys, I just finished this fantastic book! It reminded me of Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but then it became something unique. Anyone can find something meaningful in this story. It's all about overcoming obstacles - but it's open to interpretation. The writing is unbelievably good, like Murakami's best work yet, packed with his profound wisdom. The story touches on the pain of being human, the mystery of consciousness, heartbreak, and loss, and it makes you feel it all as you read. It's symbolic, magical, wise, and, most importantly, deeply comforting. I loved it!

Another utterly brilliant novel by Murakami- which took him decades of reworking to finish and glowing with the maturity of his seasoned, deeply thought-provoking, philosophical and yes, at times unsettling, writing. What started 40 years ago as a short story has been expanded the universe of his novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

The worlds of life and death, reality and fantasy, play out in an enigmatic story of a 16-year-old boy whose first love vanishes without a trace and he quest in his fervent imagination to find her. He finds her in a walled city that they had dreamed up together, filled with dreams in eggs that need to be read, a fierce Gatekeeper and the requirement to live there that you must detach from your shadow and let it die. And of course, there resides his 16-year-old love, sadly with no memory of him. But he gets to spend every day beside her. Meanwhile shadows have distinct personalities and fight for their own survival warning that a person without a shadow is incomplete. The city’s wall has a mind of its own, moving to redefine the town’s borders and to separate it from the hard-edge reality of the world we know. The effect is both hallucinatory and other-worldly, compelling and baffling.

Eventually bounced against his will out of this imaginary city when he decides to save his shadow, the now adult man moves out of Tokyo leaving his job in book distribution to a small mountain village on a quest to become a librarian. Even more bizarre events transpire from there.

Murakami’s lifelong writing themes thread through this latest novel as well: favorite jazz, cats, and a protagonist who despite being completely average ends up having extraordinary experiences. He also rifts on Plato’s cave- questioning the very nature of what it is we take for “reality.” In Murakami’s universe of magic realism, our subconscious and imagination have as much claim to what is real as our consciousness.

Like all his amazing work, you end up both engaged and puzzled, challenged and unsettled, swept along in his sparse, poetic writing, pondering the meaning of life, and yearning for more.

Thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

"The City and Its Uncertain Walls" contains an "Afterword" by Haruki Murakami with a side note that it pained him to include it but he felt the novel needed some additional explanation. I am so grateful that he did this as I was not "in the loop" on this novel's origin story and the rich history it's held (both in print and, especially, in the author's mind, body, and soul)! If you are reading Murakami with any enthusiasm then I'm assuming you are a fan of his writing. I AM a fan of this author. His works are notably surreal, enigmatic, mystical, and (as the kids say) hella deep. His settings are fantastical and unique yet his characters are, conversely, very similar in many ways -- at least in my reading experience. Maybe because he is a male author, his male characters often feel clearer to me and most seem to be seeking other-worldly, sometimes nostalgic, people, places, and things. The female characters often seem dreamy and distant, intelligent and unreachable.
I have a tendency to get lost in Haruki Murakami novels in a GREAT way. I love to sometimes be utterly lost and submerged in a world that's dreamlike -- maybe a bit surreal but also familiar. And this novel is set in LIBRARIES (my happy place) and includes some strange looking unicorns and references to the Beatles. I'll leave any additional descriptors and plot points to the critics, other reviewers, etc.
I can say that I did enjoy this novel: it was very long (as many of his novels are -- but I don't think I fully appreciated the HISTORY of its origins. I needed that afterword for the bigger picture. This novel has existed for a long time -- rrom a "novella (or long short story)" published (to the author's ongoing regret(!!) in 1980 -- per the afterword -- and then in a parallel form as "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" a novel published in 1985. All that to say the current novel - set to publish on 11/19/2024 - is an idea that has lived inside this author and emerged (and reemerged) and has now RE-reemerged over four decades (at least)!!!
I'm going to read its "companion" iteration HBW, etc. next and am looking forward to catching the similarities and threads of meaning that run through the books and, importantly, through the author. This novel was written throughout the pandemic shutdown, from March 2020 onward, which feels perfect in itself. We all existed in a city with uncertain walls for days on end (and I, for one, kept myself sane by reading the stories and dreams of others). Thanks to #NetGalley and #Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for your generosity in allowing me to read this wonderful author. He is a legend.

In all honestly I had never heard of Haruki Murakami before and I was totally unfamiliar with his books. Therefore when I started reading I was really surprised with the weird and awkward plot and the magical realism.

It is hard because I did not finish the book just because it was not to my tastes but I understand that this is a type and style of book that I know a lot of people would love.

I'm a huge Murakami fan and I'm always going to be one of the first to snap up a new novel of his. I love the weirdness, the extreme length, and even the awkward pacing of his stories. The City and Its Uncertain Walls fits nicely into all those categories: weird, long, awkward. While I enjoyed it, I don't think this is his best book, and that's likely because it was one of his earliest books that he later revisited, and it didn't benefit from the fresh perspective that a more seasoned Murakami would have brought to a new book.

That said, his books always make you think, and this one is no different. It's a story of longing, of loneliness, and the mystery of dreams, and how perspective changes over time.

If you are just starting out with Murakami, go for one of his other books first, then come to this when you have a sense of his style, and are ready for a slow, dreamy introspection.