The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Reviews

“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

"Mysterious, illusive… there is something about the way [Murakami] writes that is so captivating.”
—Rumaan Alam, The Today Show
 
"Ghostbustlingly alive. I was moved by [Murakami’s] portrait of impossible loss, how it can carve within us a Stygian underworld to which we are always being summoned. I even interpreted Murakami’s stinting on fictional norms as an attempt to more directly represent the self-exiling quality of melancholic grief.”
      —Junot Diaz, New York Times
 
"As we stare down social and ecological disasters, we need new ways to talk about what is real. Murakami writes most transparently about our contemporary moment toward the end of his latest novel in a reflection on the ‘pandemic of the soul.”
      —Renee Sims, Los Angeles Times
 
★ “Astonishing, puzzling, and hallucinatory as only Murakami can be, and one of his most satisfying tales.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

★ "The ingenuity of Murakami’s tale lies in the resonances he establishes between the two worlds…It’s an astonishing achievement."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

★ “Murakami fans, of course, will appreciate his iconic tropes—lost love, loneliness, missing women, and other realities—along with his comforting leitmotifs, namely cats, whiskey, jazz and classical music, and beloved books. In Murakami’s multiverses, as always, fascination dominates.” 
      — Booklist (starred review)

★ “In his trademark assured, graceful prose, Murakami has produced a work of tremendous ambition that on a sentence-by-sentence level feels like sitting down with a friend tohear them tell a very strange story. It’s another masterwork from one of our finest living novelists, and a must-read for Murakami devotees.”
—Book Page (starred review)
 
★ “At times a meditation on romance, reality vs. fantasy, ghosts, and the power of written words, this metaphysical novel examines the questionable value of timekeeping while thoroughly exploring unconditional love, self-imposed constraints, and deaths of one’s body and soul.”
—Library Journal (starred review) Expand reviews