Book Review: ‘The City And Its Uncertain Walls'

By Haruki Murakami, Author of IQ84, Kafka on the Shore, and Norwegian Wood

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

This much let me avow —

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream.

- Edgar Allen Poe (1849)

L-R (1) Cover, The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2) Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami’s “The City And Its Uncertain Walls” (released today) is at once a story of chaste first love, an extended mediation on the psychology of self, and a valentine to libraries. Murakami’s fourteenth novel (and his first in six years) weaves familiar, gossamer fibers into a weighty tapestry.

The story begins with a “meet cute,” two bookish teens seated adjacent at a ceremony in which they are finalists in an essay contest. Their epistolary courtship involves letters creating a mysterious city behind impregnable walls.

We next meet the main character as an adult at those same city walls, where a Gatekeeper separates him from his shadow. He reunites with his childhood love who hasn’t aged and who has no memory of their prior romance. She becomes his assistant in a mysterious library of dreams.

Instead of books, the s…