街とその不確かな壁 (‘The City And Its Uncertain Walls’)

A novel could best be described as someone else’s deeply felt dream that we willingly partake of until gradually it feels like the whole wispy enterprise is mostly of our own making. At first everything is broad, undefinable; soon patterns emerge and symbols uprise; eventually we can almost forget that somebody else is steering the ship. Or else we subconsciously come to feel that we are, at the very least, co-captains of this unwieldy huge barge, standing at the steering while alongside this unseen-but-ever-present author, crashing in tandem through the waves of our collective unconscious in search of deeper meanings that may or may not even exist where we hope they reside.

Haruki Murakami’s 2023 novel 街とその不確かな壁 (‘The City And Its Uncertain Walls’) feels just like a dream. It has characters, shapes, recurrences, overlaps, but it never quite coheres, constantly comes across as misshapen in its deeply felt crevices of human longings and introspections.

Yet this is not a diss. All of his fiction feels more than slightly just ‘off’, but this novel — (partly) about another world, realm, dimension where (mostly) unseen residents live behind a high wall in drab eternal isolation, even as our narrator slides between this world and that one at two key stages in his life — emanates itself as even more scattershot, focused in its theme but slipshod in any overall narrative clarity.

Once again — not a slam.

A compliment, rather.

For this is a novel both about youthful, yearning romanticism merging into middle-age, mundane acquiescence, a book that toggles and tethers these two states of aging within a fantastical premise that elongates its murky narrative intentions over hundreds of pages of grave philosophizing and poignant human fears.

I suspect that longtime Murakami fans will adore its inscrutable clarity while also rereading the book many times to relive its oddly comforting and ‘nonsensical’ narrative heaves; I also believe that anti-Murakami cliques will want to throw this large tome straight at the nearest wall more than once.

Neither will be wrong.

Dreams make us feel so divorced from each other.

The novel is ‘Murakami’ to the point of almost self-parody, but there’s also an existential terror as the story unfolds here that is quietly, persistently enchanting, one that kept me enthralled even as I gradually realized that any kind of ‘resolution’ would likely be unfulfilling.

I was wrong and I was right.

I didn’t get what I thought I would, but I also didn’t know what I wanted. This unwieldly narrative is both novel-as-a-dream and life-as-a-dream. If you buy into both those ways of examining fiction and coming to terms with ‘real’ life, you might, as I was, be consistently moved, even shaken.

Murakami has famously said that he never plans or plots whatsoever when he sets out to craft a story, so it makes sense that this latest novel feels, to a great extent, as if he’s just winging it as the pages fly by, but in his afterword to the book — wherein he admits that he doesn’t particularly like afterwords as a whole but that this tale in particular might actually warrant one — he inadvertently offers some clues as to why readers might feel a specific disjointedness in the novel that they just read.

He mentions that the novel started out as a story he published in a Japanese literary magazine in 1980, when his writing career was just getting going. The title was a wee bit different, albeit only by a comma: 街と,その不確かな壁. In Japanese, ‘と’ essentially means ‘and’; the comma after ‘と’ is hard to replicate in English; it represents a pause, but we don’t usually pause in that way in English after ‘and’. (I’m sure that both western and Japanese scholars will undoubtedly argue for decades as to what the initial inclusion, and subsequent exclusion, of that comma might ultimately mean.)

Something about the story didn’t quite sit right with him, so he never had it republished in any Japanese or international literary magazines. Yet he admits that its long-term narrative effect could be felt in his later writings, relating how HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD kind of resembles this current novel.

By which I think Murakami means that, while not identical, the structure is certainly recognizable to long-time fans of his work, at least in the early goings — one world in this chapter, another world in that chapter. Alternating. With characters that seem to be, if not identical, at least parallel versions of one another.

(For that is, at least for me, what Murakami is going after here in this novel — an exploration of all those ‘other’ selves that we wield, abandon, share or covet. In ‘this’ realm, or another. Which may, in fact, just be more of the same, or simply the same.)

What causes the novel to feel rather misshapen could be due to the fact that Murakami let the story sit for a good four decades, as he states in the aforementioned afterword, and it was only during the start of COVID, he tells us, that he returned to the tale, in one year pumping out two further sections of the story that certainly align with the first part, but also feel noticeably different, their cohesion arriving in slightly slanted forms.

For a Murakami fan, this is more than expected, and for me almost welcome, for aesthetic reasons; Murakami admits that he wrote the first part as a thirty-year old man, and continued the story when he was already past seventy. As a result, there’s a weight here, a gravity-of-time, a mourning, an underlying melancholy, that I found cumulatively enchanting and undeniably disturbing – the realization of what time, by simply being time, does to us.

On a surface level, whatever ‘plot’ exists here is quite simple, revealed in the first few pages of the novel, so this is hardly a spoiler:

Our first-person narrator recounts how, in the summer of his seventeenth year, when his new girlfriend was sixteen, she implored him to seek out and locate her ‘true’ self in that place where an old city existed behind a great wall. The ‘real’ her was there, you see; the girl in front of him, the one who lived in a different city from him, who walked with him on treks along the river, who had a stepmother and sister six-years younger than herself?

Not the ‘true’ her.

I add those minor biographical details to her life because that’s sort of all that we are given, since both our narrator and his girlfriend exist as almost archetypal examples of human youth, young love, questioning souls, adamant beings, muddle spirits. Both (admittedly) nameless. Everything here is both commonplace in its narrative execution while being intensely Jungian in its alignment with the deepest, most divided mythic parts of ourselves. (Not to mention our ‘selves’!)

For while we may have a youth who falls hard for the first time with the girl of his dreams, we also have a situation wherein he is able to somehow cross between worlds and seek out another, avatar-ish version of his girlfriend in a city shielded from savage beasts that constantly bay at its walls, and where this version of his not-yet-lover knows not who he is.

What she does know that he has a job to do, which is to spend day after day in dank, dark, gloomy library, ‘reading’ all those dreams that are lined up next to one another on the walls — egg-shaped formations of human nighttime-sojourns that only he can read, dissect, understand.

Very ‘Murakami’, no?

I don’t want to get into too many specifics of the novel’s narrative progression, because, although it mostly feels, as one reads, that it bears all the hallmarks of a meandering dream, there are also recurring patterns that are surprising and moving in their random stabs at the heart.

Suffice it to say that, either in ‘our’ world or that ‘other’, there are aging male soldiers and ageless female spirits, and individual shadows that each must abandon in order to progress through life, and a small-town library amiably haunted by its former head-honcho, and long-separated unconsummated lovers who stop replying to hand-written letters, and a brilliant young boy who looks like a character from THE YELLOW SUBMARINE movie that The Beatles put out in the 1960s, a lad who just might hold the existential key to our aging, ever aging selves, aging-in-the-same-way-that-you-and-me-both-have-to-put-our-younger-selves-behind at some point.

Time itself becomes permeable here, however.

Dimensions, too.

Can we ever truly merge with one another? Might we ‘read’ each other’s deepest dreams? What sort of walls, concrete or otherwise, distance my heart from yours? Are they passable, permeable, these walls? Why is it that innocent erotic longings give away to complicated late-life romantic fumbling for affection? And is the ultimate darkness that awaits us all at the end our cycles innately a bad thing, or a final cold comfort of sorts? A loss of the ‘self’ entirely due to a merging with something that innately awaits us all in the end?

These are the questions Murakami kept provoking me with, almost taunting me. The novel reads like an ongoing, almost-endless dream that openly acknowledges its own waking-life sources, at one point even having the characters discuss the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as if even these fictional people are all-too-aware that they are but pawns in Murakami’s dissection of the literary universe that has given rise to their own tentative short-term creation.

The book is full of such charms — should you, of course, be open to Murakami’s bewitching style of approach — but there is a certain kick when reading it in its present Japanese form. Murakami’s style, long-remarked to be ‘English’ in its shape and formation, feels especially so in this case; one should not forget that, in the time between his last novel and this one, Murakami has published four translations (collections of short stories from F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Cheever, THE LAST TYCOON, again by Fitzgerald, and CAMINO ISLAND< a John Grisham novel retitled FINDING GATSBY in Japanese, with a first-edition of THE GREAT GATSBY at its crime-story centre.) He has spent decades of his working life reading English, line-by-line. His Japanese writing can therefore can read, for those who read Japanese, as if it’s a story that has been translated from the English, in that its direct manner has a bluntness that Japanese prose doesn’t usually convey. He also uses an astounding amount of similes and metaphors in this novel when describing actions or emotions, literary techniques that are relatively rare in Japanese fiction. When translated into English, his style thus comes across as entirely fluid and readable, but in Japanese it wields a ‘western’ kick to it that is adorable to some readers and off-putting to others. Yes, his Japanese is relatively ‘easy’ to read, in that he doesn’t often use difficult kanji or unusual words, but he is most certainly toying with his own language in a continually sly way.

These clever, coy manipulations extend to his use of personal pronouns here, which might give his English translators a lingering headache. Indeed, the first word of the book is ‘kimi’, an informal usage of ‘you’ which is often directed at a friend, lover, someone close to you. In this case, the narrator is talking to his teenage girlfriend. In English, all we have is ‘you’, and that hardly carries with it any affectionate over(or under)tones.

Another migraine-inducing challenge for translators will be the pronouns he uses when flipping back and forth between ‘real’ and ‘other’ worlds. In the ‘real’ world, he writes out ‘kimi’ using hiragana (きみ); in that ‘other’ world, he uses the kanji form (君). For readers of Japanese, these are subtle hints that we are in a different place.

Not replicable in English, so perhaps they will have to revert a technique like rendering alternative dimensions via different fonts, as in HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND THE END OF THE WORLD, in which italics was used to differentiate space and time, or perhaps via present-and-past tense.

The point being, as ‘westernized’ as Murakami is often as accused of being, in both style and content, I would argue that there is a fundamental bedrock of Japanese thinking and feeling that permeates his work.

Part of this has to do with the non-explanatory means by which events are displayed and conveyed. Someone (I forget who) once said that the Japanese are able to shift into imaginary scenarios with much greater ease than their western counterparts. We require explanations and logic to place the fantastical in a suitable place of artistic appreciation; Japanese consumers of art are much more willing to just go-with-the-flow.

In this novel, as in all of his work, Murakami leaves out all the logic. Strange stuff happens. People accept that strange stuff happens. They ponder this strange stuff, endlessly. Yet they intuitively understand, well, strange stuff happens, stuff that might unlock the keys of their heart.

Deal with it.

I’m not saying, by any means, that all Japanese readers get off on this stuff, or even accept its worth as a genuinely valid aesthetic approach. I’ve talked to a number of Japanese readers who will admit that Murakami is certainly easy to read, but they didn’t know what the hell was going on in his books.

For me, that’s the mystique of it all – the dreaminess of it all.

Yet one gets the sense of an underlying human sympathy that is very concrete, steadily solid, reminiscent of the speech gave years ago in Israel that when it comes to an egg splatting against the side of the wall — very familiar images to readers of this novel! — he is always on the side of the egg.

(One could, perhaps, use the above quote as an entire thesis in which to discuss this book’s evocation of the human spirit’s innate longing for freedom and transcendence in the face of eternal manmade barriers.)

The novel speaks to a lot of notions of innocence and aging, romance and loss, self-made barriers and individual entry-points, isolation and depression, regression and renewal, but it does so in remote, symbolic ways. Everything is right in front of us here, but symbolically so, even as we are not quite sure what these symbols are supposed to represent, even as their employment is undoubtedly getting at deep-rooted aspects of our psyche that welcome their confusing gray gloss.

And even if some of these symbols are familiar, I don’t care if they are tropes. Artists have only so many themes, ideas, concerns. Eventually they run the risk of becoming mere tics. So be it. The art lies in how they are shifted around, like literary three-card-monte.

Murakami, now in the final, hopefully extended stages of his authorial career, has, with this novel, gained a deeper kind of ambiguity that I feel is both aesthetically liberating and existentially haunting. He’s trying to gnaw away at what our shadow-selves might represent, what our final forms of life might resemble. There’s this continual emergence of the unfathomable that each character can’t help but accept or reject even as they cyclically try to either expel or embrace its sheer unknowingness. The unknown is a dream from which we repeatedly awaken from and sink into as time takes us all down.

I’m not exactly sure what happens at the end, but I’m not sure that our narrator does, either, let alone Murakami.

Like both the author and his creation, I’m fine with that.