The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Murakami first wrote about the walled city in a 1980 short story that became the ‘End of the World’ sections of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Forty years later, he returned to it — more fully, with more time, and with a different understanding of what it means.

The novel’s first movement follows a young man and a girl through a correspondence and then into a walled town surrounded by a golden forest, where shadows are detached at the gate and the Dream Reader works in the library reading dreams stored in the skulls of long-dead unicorns. The girl disappears; the young man tries to find her; the town reveals itself as something other than a place of loss.

Decades pass. The same narrator, now middle-aged, takes a job as head of a small public library in a town in the Fukushima mountains. A boy arrives who reads nothing but The Arabian Nights in a corner of the library. The walled city, somehow, is present again.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is the most serene of Murakami’s novels — a late-career work that revisits his foundational mythology and finds in it a kind of peace. For readers who know Hard-Boiled Wonderland, it is essential; for those who don’t, it is the longer, more meditative version of the same world.

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What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The City and Its Uncertain Walls apart: The most serene and accepting of his novels — a late-career change of tone; The library setting is beautifully realised; and Rewarding for readers who know Hard-Boiled Wonderland. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The City and Its Uncertain Walls give it weight beyond its surface narrative. The walled city as final destination rather than loss — Murakami’s changing relationship to his own mythology. The library as refuge and threshold. A late novel’s peace with its own recurring obsessions. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Haruki Murakami’s prose in The City and Its Uncertain Walls is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The least narratively urgent of his major works. The second section (the Japanese library) is less compelling than the walled city. Some repetition of earlier Murakami motifs. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Committed Murakami readers, especially those who know Hard-Boiled Wonderland

Murakami’s Return to the Walled City

The City and Its Uncertain Walls was published in Japan on April 13, 2023 — Murakami’s first novel since Killing Commendatore in 2017 — and appeared in English translation by Ted Goossen in September 2024. The novel is unusually personal in its origins: it revisits and substantially expands a short story Murakami published in a Japanese literary magazine in 1980, very early in his career, that described a nameless narrator entering a walled city and losing his shadow. That story was never collected in book form; Murakami has said he was dissatisfied with it, and this novel represents his attempt to resolve what the story left unresolved. The walled town also appeared, in transformed form, in the split narrative of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985).

The Novel’s Structure and Reception

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is divided into three parts, with the walled city of the first part giving way to a more realistic Japanese narrative in the second before converging in the third. At over 500 pages in its Japanese edition, it is a major work, though some critics noted that the novel is more elegiac in tone than his earlier fiction — less concerned with the tension between worlds than with what it means to live with loss and incompletion. For readers interested in Murakami’s development, the novel provides a unique opportunity to see him revisiting the imagery of his earliest work with the resources of his maturity: the same landscape, forty-three years later.

The Boy Who Reads The Arabian Nights

Among the novel’s most quietly effective elements is the figure of the unnamed boy who appears in the second section — the realistic Japanese narrative set in the mountain-town library — and who spends his days reading The Arabian Nights in a corner, saying almost nothing, apparently uninterested in any other book. His presence is never explained in the novel’s realistic terms. He is, the reader comes to understand, a figure from the walled city, a traveler between worlds who has found his way into the library’s ordinary hours. Murakami’s handling of this figure is characteristic of his late style: the wonder is muted, the strangeness presented without drama, the metaphysical implication allowed to accumulate slowly. The boy is never confronted, never explained, and when he is gone it is simply the fact of his absence that marks the change.

Late Murakami and the Question of Serenity

Critics of The City and Its Uncertain Walls have noted its unusual calm — a quality that separates it from the earlier major novels, which tend toward urgency, crisis, and narrative momentum. The serenity is not evasion but a different kind of engagement: the novel is interested in what it means to live with irresolution, to accept a life organized around an absence rather than to resolve it. For readers who know Hard-Boiled Wonderland, the return to the walled city carries a specific charge — the earlier novel was about the terror of losing the self; this one, forty years later, is about the peace that becomes possible once the loss is accepted.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 3.7/5 — Murakami’s most recent novel — a late meditation on the walled city he first imagined in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, now seen as a place of genuine peace rather than erasure.