「经济学人」The City and Its Uncertain Walls

He is not so much a surrealist as a dogged observer of solitude

The City and Its Uncertain Walls. By Haruki Murakami. Knopf; 464 pages; $21.50. Harvill Secker; £25

PHILIP ROTH never really left New Jersey. Saul Bellow could not keep his characters out of Chicago. And Haruki Murakami’s narrators—unmarried, often middle-aged men with solitary habits—continually slip into eerie netherworlds.

The alternate realm in the Japanese writer’s latest novel is the same one in which the narrator was marooned at the end of “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” (1985). It is a town surrounded by an impregnable wall and governed by an inscrutable, imposing Gatekeeper. In “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” this locale—where the nameless narrator reads “old dreams” from unicorn skulls in a library—was part of the narrator’s subconscious. It was a place he had created in his own mind.

In “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” characters find their way into that world. As a teenager, this narrator falls in love with a girl whose “real self” is in the alternate world; she vanishes; he matures, and one day he falls into a hole and wakes up in the other place. For the rest of the book the narrator flits between the two realms.

Mr Murakami links the novels throughout. (Both Raymond Chandler’s detective fiction and Jorge Luis Borges’s fantastical prose experiments seem to be influences.) In an afterword Mr Murakami writes that the tales stem from the same novella, “The City, and Its Uncertain Walls” (1980), and that the two novels are complementary. What distinguishes them is tone. “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” is a propulsive page-turner. “The City and Its Uncertain Walls” is more meditative: the work of an author confident that he has earned readers’ attention over his long career.

The novelist is 75; this is his first new novel in six years (and it is not entirely new). If this is Mr Murakami’s last work, how will he be remembered? He is best known for his mordant surrealism. But the flights of fancy only work because they are grounded in a detailed reality.

The archetypal Murakami protagonist is an observer. Stories happen to them; they rarely instigate conflict or set out looking for adventure without being prodded. Failure and unrequited longing define their romantic lives. The writer’s principal concern has always been the pain and necessity of learning to be alone, and the worthwhile difficulty of establishing real connections. Those concerns are universal. Mr Murakami’s compassionate rendering of them is why millions around the world seek solitude to read his books. (Dec 30th 2024)

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