A lonely teen-age boy wins a regional school essay contest and meets another prize winner. She is a year younger and they promise to write to each other with their prize fountain pens. They end up in a platonic relationship, visit each other's towns, and have long conversations which seem to be more important than their budding romance. One day, the boy waits for his girlfriend in their park for hours and she finally shows up. After they walk wordlessly around the town, they return to the park where the girl tells him that she is not really who he thinks she is. She is but a shadow, and her real self lives in the walled city that the boy constructed in his imagination. They never meet again...until.
The boy grows up, leaves his small town, and is educated at a Tokyo university. He gets a job distributing books to libraries and bookstores, and learns the book trade. One night, he dreams that he has made it into that walled city and becomes a Dreamreader in the town library. There, he meets his girlfriend, still age sixteen, who only knows that she must cure his torn eyes with herbal tea so that he can fulfill his mission of reading the dreams. She doesn't know him in this life, but lets him walk her home after the library closes late at night. By that time, the unicorns have long left the town for their pasture outside the walls, and though the clock in the tower has no hands, everyone knows it is time to sleep.
This is vintage Murakami, as he acknowledges in the Afterword. Based on a novella that he published before his break-out novels Run Sheep Run and Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The City and its Uncertain Walls asks you to suspend belief and logic. A ghost may materialize to instruct you on the best way to run your library. You literally might wake up in a different world. A lovely woman might protect herself against "hypotheticals" with an iron undergarment. It is important to not allow your shadow to die, even though you can't possess it in the walled city. And in the harsh winter, unicorns die in the snow where their bodies are burned by the Gatekeeper.
Murakami is the master of magic realism, where elements of fantasy are woven into real life. But this is not a fantasy novel-no sword and sorcery or dragons, nor witches and spells. Both worlds contain their own brand of reality which anyone can relate to, even though they probably haven't personally experienced much of it. All of it could happen, however unlikely. If readers can keep an open mind, they will be richly rewarded with beautiful images, original ideas, and the most lyrical writing that they will ever read. Time to find out if you can really choose your own adventure, or if adventure will choose you.
Reviewed by Donna Ballard
Publication date - November 19, 2024
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