A new door to Haruki Murakami’s vast and labyrinthine world has opened.
"The City and Its Uncertain Walls" (“Machi to Sono Futashikana Kabe”) hit shelves in Japan on April 13. It’s the first full-length novel in six years from the beloved bestselling author.
The 661-page book follows a narrator into a city with high walls, seeking the “true self” of a crush. Over three parts, the narrator moves from 17 years old to middle age, and the story shifts between reality and a dream-like state.
The title alludes to "the question of whether the wall that separates one's self from another world is really solid," Murakami told Kyodo.
Part one of the book reworks a story of the same title from 1980, one that the author roundly rejected and called a failed work. "I had published the story in a half-baked state (in a literary magazine), and regretted it very much," Murakami said.
But the themes, story and title all stayed with him over the years. “It was stuck, like a fishbone,” he said in an interview with BuzzFeed Japan. “I wasn’t satisfied with the work, but I took a liking to the title.”
The image of a city with a high wall, too, featured in his 1985 novel, “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” Indeed, some of Murakami’s most iconic works, including "Norwegian Wood” and "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle,” are retooled from old stories. “This is more proof that Murakami writes like a musician: He takes old melodies and rhythms and riffs on them in new ways,” says translator and Japan Times contributor Daniel Morales.
The pandemic, it seems, gave Murakami space to dislodge the bone. In March 2020, he started writing the new novel, and without going out much or traveling, he worked on it nearly nonstop over the next three years.
Murakami is the rare publishing unicorn whose works are considered literary, but can also draw crowds and generate major sales. “A Murakami novel is an Olympic event. We only get them every six to seven years,” Morales told The Japan Times’ Deep Dive podcast last month.
In anticipation of the release, Junkudo bookstore in Nagoya created a handmade gachapon capsule dispenser that would spit out Murakami sentences. Last night, die-hard fans, so-called harukisuto, attended a midnight release party at Kinokuniya in Shinjuku to pick up roughly 70 preordered copies.
Still, publisher Shinchosha announced an initial print run of just 300,000 copies, which falls short of the 700,000 and 600,000 ordered respectively for the two volumes of Murakami’s previous full-length novel, “Killing Commendatore,” which was released in Japan in February 2017.
CORRECTION: This story was updated on April 14 to correct the page length of Haruki Murakami’s new book, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls.” The original manuscript was 1,200 pages. The novel is 661 pages long.
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