The City and Its Uncertain Walls

A Novel

De: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator

Narrado por: Brian Nishii

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A REAL SIMPLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

"Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction."—The New York Times • "More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world."—San Francisco Chronicle • "Murakami is masterful."—Los Angeles Times

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.

"Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn't this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?”—Haruki Murakami, from the afterword

©2024 Haruki Murakami (P)2024 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“It is with unabashed joy that I am here to report: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Murakami’s first novel in six years, is also one of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling. The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a paean to books, reading, and libraries, an investigation into the relationship between romance and realism, and a timely fable about how relationships, societies, and communities both protect themselves against threats and foster beauty and truth.”—Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe

“Spellbinding. . . . [An] oddly irresistible fable. . . . [The] eerie landscape of snows, forests and torrents is beautifully evoked as Mr. Murakami the seasoned storyteller of loss, loneliness and passing time takes charge. The action dawdles, then leaps, with a trademark blend of soap opera and sublimity. In deadpan, slow-burn, quietly hypnotic prose, delicately conveyed in Mr. Gabriel’s translation, our narrator settles into a becalmed life as guardian of the small-town library stacks. . . . Mr. Murakami understands these parallel territories of the mind not simply as escapism but as a precious refuge for those who ‘had never put down roots in this world.’ He conjures the charm, and also the harm, of all-consuming obsessions. In the perfect walled town, no cats prowl, because ‘nothing unneeded’ can exist there.”—Boyd Tonkin, The Wall Street Journal

“[Murakami’s] imagination is one of a kind, and his blend of pop culture, postmodernism and Japanese mythology is a wholly unique contribution to literature.”—Jonathan Russell Clark, The Washington Post

outstanding, his best

I really feel like this is a culmination of Murakami's entire career as a writer. A masterpiece.

A bone in the throat, but still...

This story, the author says, stuck like a bone in his throat for a few years. It's like eating mackerel. Lots of bones. That said, it is still Murakami. I think many of his most annoying traits on view here: pseudo-innocent discussions of teen sex, commenting on the weirdness we should feel, over simplicity of language, reference to other writers. The concept itself redeems. Western writers don't really want to address the complexity of composite selves and he does, and perhaps since that could be an overly sophisticated theme, a commitment to simple language must be appreciated. His name dropping of other artists doesn't always feel like it should, like a tribute. Sometimes it feels like name dropping. The story still a little messy and disjointed. He has a lot of confidence in his readers. I think I would have given him a little more self doubt in his early writings and that relentless organic growth of voluminous narrative could have come together even more neatly (as it does in K by the Shore, and Commendetore, and a couple others.) I still like this about him, there is a genuine sense uf the uncanniness of life and many more skilled novelists don't have that nor know it. Somehow BN is the perfect narrator for him.

Envying Haruki

A man is wearing a dress.
When asked “why?”
He answers:
"When I wear a dress, I feel like a few lines from a poem"
That man is a man created by Haruki Murakami, in his new book that I am listening to,
And I envy Haruki,
Because I was supposed to tell you that when I hug you I feel like a few lines from a poem, or even more, a whole poem,
But I only told you that after I heard Haruki.

You know that I am competitive,
So I'm trying to beat this Haruki guy before his next book comes out.

So you should know that when I hug you I feel like:

A drop of rain falling into the most beautiful flower in the garden,

Leonardo's brushstroke between the lips and cheeks of the Mona Lisa,

A grain of sand that the wind carried and dropped on the highest place on the Everest,

But I have to admit,

That it is difficult to compete with "When I wear a dress I feel like a few lines from a poem"
... A sentence that one day,

will stand on the stage in Stockholm,

and receive the Nobel Prize.

Amazing surreal storytelling

Savor like a fine scotch with a splash of mineral water. A story of grief, loss, despair and other dimensions. Visits from ghosts and becoming disconnected with your own shadow, finding that the past and future do not exist.
Jazz music and freshly baked blueberry muffins, sitting by an old stove on a cold day.
A story that is maybe better read than listened to, but I’m thankful for the option.

His writing is magical

Murakami’s intriguing stories are sublime, combined with his magical writing, his books speak to the layers upon layers of the human psyche and heart. I’m so spoiled after reading his work that I can hardly read another.

Lyrical beauty in story wonderfully narrated

Dreamlike story poetically written and the narrator feels authentic to the book. I have read much by this author and this book feels like a summary of his philosophy.

The same but different and so much better

Have I heard this before, I’m sure I have… oh yeah… wait, that’s different, oh wow! That’s what I thought throughout and it was such an amazing journey. I love the shifts. It was great!

Beautifuly read and written.

Murakami has a sound and a feel that will either resonate deeply with you or not. It is worth everyone's time to find the art that makes them feel something in addition to admiration and for me this story did that.

Extraordinary Writing

While this novel evolved over 40 years from a short novella, I read it as a fan of Murakami for the past 35 years. The story unfolds,with its iconic jazz references, continually emphasizing time, memory, and the contemporary notion of awareness. Undoubtedly there’s much to be said about this novel. But having just finished it, I believe this is a book that speaks to many dimensions of experience and existence, Classic Murakami but also a literary master pushing his craft beyond his own literary history. Extraordinary.

Desperately needs editing

I love Murakami but found this book so disappointing. Part I was good, but it was also the 3rd time he had written it in a different form. It got progressively worse from there, horribly repetitive with no purpose, and ended without a point. He should have just stuck with revisions to the original story; this triptych lessens the quality and impact of the first portion of the book. Such a shame.