Space, Memory, Identity, and Worlds of Escape

Book review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami Translated from Japanese by Philip Gabriel

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Reading Murakami often feels like stepping into a half-forgotten dream, where the boundaries of real and imagined dissolve without warning. In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, he leads us across such thresholds into alternate dimensions- drawing us into spaces so vivid you can almost run your fingers along their texture, feel their pulse at a cellular level. One moment you are here, in the tangible world, and the next you are elsewhere, wandering through a city you never knew existed inside you.

This novel is, in a sense, a return. Murakami first introduced the image of a walled city in a novella he published in Japan in 1980, and later reimagined it in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985). The City and Its Uncertain Walls can be read as a re-exploration of that terrain- an attempt to revisit a city he never fully left behind, whose presence has lingered in the folds of his imagination for decades.

The city described in this book is both unsettling and magnetic. It promises escape, a parallel life, another identity. Its streets, at once mundane and surreal, are inhabited by one-horned beasts. Its library is not filled with books, but with dreams waiting to be read. And its walls- alive, shifting, temporal - reshape themselves as though testing the limits of your belonging. To live here, one must surrender a part of themselves. The trade-off is haunting, but strangely alluring.

Murakami’s insistence on detail makes the city impossible to forget. He circles back to it again and again, until its contours etch themselves into your mind, slipping into the recesses where memory and dream intermingle. You carry it with you long after the book closes - sometimes even into your own dreams.

At its core, this novel wrestles with themes of identity, memory, grief, and loneliness. Yet it also opens a door to the possibilities of escape - not the shallow kind, but the kind that reshapes how we inhabit our own lives. For architects, for dreamers, for anyone who cares about spaces both real and imagined, Murakami’s world-building can be a blueprint for new realms of thought.

One can almost imagine Italo Calvino pausing over these pages, and nodding. Perhaps he would have added this city to Invisible Cities - a dreamlike landscape where a river flows softly to soothe the soul; where the clocktower has no hands, and time itself seems suspended in a repetitive loop; where mythical beasts roam unhurried; where libraries cradle dreams instead of words; and where, to enter, you must leave a fragment of yourself behind.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls seeps into you, alters the texture of your inner core, and lingers like a dream you cannot fully wake from.