The City and Its Uncertain Walls
Eerie ... Couldn’t shake the sense that Murakami has told this story better elsewhere, or that the novel’s obsessive focus on the narrator’s aimless woes didn’t do its characterization, world-building or psychological depth any favors. It’s as though the novel itself is a melancholic ghost, drained of experiential matter ... At the same time, my real self was delighted by the novel’s uncanny shell games, by its Murakami voice, which (in contrast to the often anhedonic characters) is so ghostbustingly alive. I was moved by his portrait of impossible loss.
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This 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. But in a Murakami novel, normality won’t persist for long ... Throughout this journey, borders between internal and external reality, the conscious mind and its dream-dwelling 'shadow,' waver and blur.
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Returning to such a familiar setting, along with employing the plots and themes he favors, adds a greater sense of fatigue, at least for this reader ... Perhaps those less familiar with Murakami will be as enchanted by his worlds as I once was and hope to be again in the future.
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