The City and Its Uncertain Walls

The celebrated author of Norwegian Wood and 1Q84 returns with a characteristically inventive and playful novel that shifts the boundaries of time and space, as a town’s Dream Reader takes over from a ghost as a librarian in a Fukushima province.

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The breathtaking new novel about the boundaries between worlds and individuals, from the internationally bestselling author of 1Q84.

“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 to The City and Its Uncertain Walls

The long-awaited new novel from Haruki Murakami, his first in six years, revisits a Town his readers will remember, a place where a Dream Reader reviews dreams and where our shadows become untethered from our selves. A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these strange post-pandemic times, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.

A novel about the porous boundary between the real and shadow worlds. After losing his beloved as a teenager, the narrator finds his way to the Town, a mysterious place where he finds work as a Dream Reader in the library. Back in the real world as an adult he tries to recapture his time in the Town by taking a job as a librarian in a remote location in Fukushima province, where he takes over the job from a ghost.

When a boy, M, who visits the library every day, vanishes, the boundaries between spatial and temporal realities, and between individuals, seems to have been breached. A novel about the barriers, imaginary and real, that we put up between and within ourselves.

MEDIA REVIEWS

A 'cosy' masterpiece with agony between its lines… [The City and Its Uncertain Walls is] quietly miraculous… The greatest books…are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami’s narrator enters his mysterious libraries - Telegraph

No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades. - Financial Times

Regular readers will delight in the Easter eggs nested in an unsettling quest spun from Murakami’s long-patented dream logic - Observer, Best Novels Autumn 2024

An enveloping magical realist story - i

A mysterious, magical book that reveals itself like a secret being said. Murakami offers a beguiling look at self and the lengths we go to for love - Hanako Footman, author of MONGREL

[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 - Washington Post

Murakami blends the whimsical and the threatening with the skill of that other pre-eminent Japanese visionary, Hayao Miyazaki - A.K. Blakemore, Guardian

Spellbinding...oddly irresistible - Wall Street Journal

A sublime meditation on time, age and love - Woman and Home

One of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling - Boston Globe