The City and Its Uncertain Walls

The City and Its Uncertain Walls – the long-awaited novel by Haruki Murakami loosely follows on from the author's earlier 1980 novella and thematically intersects with his cult work Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The unnamed seventeen-year-old narrator falls in love with a girl who claims that her true self exists in a mysterious walled city. When the girl suddenly disappears, the hero searches for a way to find her. To enter this parallel world, he must separate himself from his shadow. In the city, he becomes a reader of old dreams in a mysterious library, where he meets the girl again – but she no longer recognises him. Eventually, as an adult, he manages to return to the real world to find the meaning of life. Haruki Murakami delivers a melancholic and philosophical novel about lost love, the search for self, and the possibility of overcoming walls, both imagined and real.