A blurring of magic?

Has Haruki Murakami lost his magical touch? It is a question that’ll come to your mind halfway through ‘The City and Its Uncertain Walls’, his latest work. And as you get closer to the last few chapters, you’ll have your answer.

Every Murakami novel shares some common elements—surrealism, magical realism, pop culture, and loneliness. Murakami frequently blends the ordinary with the extraordinary, creating worlds where the line between reality and fantasy is blurred. The mundane and the bizarre peacefully coexist in Murakami’s world. In addition to these elements, ‘The City and Its Uncertain Walls’ also has the quintessential nameless and drifting hero and the girl he falls in love with, whom we know very little about.

Our hero falls in love at 17, with a sweet 16-year-old. In the first chapter, we are whisked into the saccharine romance of the couple — with long letters exchanged and kisses stolen under looming trees. And of course, some raging hormones. While Murakami’s writing about teens having sex when he was 35 was barely passable, his writing about the swells of a 16-year-old girl’s breasts at 75 is highly questionable.

Although everything seems to be going well for the couple at the surface level, it soon becomes obvious that a barrier — mostly metaphysical — exists between the lovestruck teens. The girl believes that the “real her” resides in a mysterious town, and the 16-year-old our hero is in love with, is merely a shadow of her real self. This town she describes, is surrounded by a shapeshifting wall, with a lone guardkeeper in charge of the town’s safety. In this town, you’ll find huge single-horned beasts who mate in the spring and perish to the biting winter cold, grumpy unicorns, discarded shadows, and a library filled with recorded dreams. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

One day, when the girl disappears, the protagonist assumes she has returned to the mysterious town. Years later, he goes in search of her and finds this town. This was only possible because the girl had told him the key to finding the town. “You just need to wish your way in. You have what it takes,” she’d said. And this being a Murakami novel, no further explanation is deemed necessary. He reunites with the love of his life, but he is a middle-aged man now and she’s still a teen. Oh, and to make matters worse, she has no recollection of him.

The rest of the novel unfolds across short chapters as we oscillate between the mysterious town and the real world. The ‘real’ world is as real as Murakami would allow it to be. Among the typical Murakami elements, you’ll find a clock with no hands, a dead man who likes hanging around, and his favourite duo — jazz and cats. The author drops plenty of metaphors along the way, hinting at what’s coming next. However, at multiple points throughout the book, several chapters can go by before anything of consequence happens.

In literature, the genre of magical realism depicts the real world with accuracy, accompanied by an undercurrent of fantasy. For magical realism to work, the world needs to remain as grounded and realistic as possible, so that fantastical elements seem ‘normal’. While Murakami gets it right most of the time, he seems to have missed the mark this time around. In an attempt to try something new, while also not straying away from what he is comfortable with, Murakami seems to have lost the plot. Some references and changes in writing style hint that Murakami might be drawing inspiration from Gabriel García Márquez — undoubtedly one of the most notable authors to have honed the genre of magical realism. Unfortunately, Murakami fails to match Marquez’s visual imagination and emotional depth. Murakami’s heavy-handedness manifests as an unpleasant tendency to exaggerate the fantastical features of magical realism.  

The meandering plot, combined with repetitive scenes and dialogue gets tiresome. At multiple points in the book, to get a point across, certain events and emotions are stated by multiple characters in almost the same words, without a change in tone. Murakami seems to have lost faith in his readers, deeming them unworthy of connecting the dots.

Despite the botched magical realism and loosely knit plot, the book is not all bad. There are parts where the author still manages to swoop in with his charm, painting a beautiful scenario and forming meaningful moments between the characters. They have been translated beautifully into English by Philip Gabriel. A hundred pages short and with crisp editing, ‘The City and its Uncertain Walls’ would’ve been much easier to consume. Despite being a sizeable read, the book does not have much weight.