As of: January 30, 2024, 3:05 p.m
By: Sven Trautwein
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In Murakami's new novel, the real and surreal worlds blur.
The protagonists move between dreams, reality and fantasy.
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Murakami is one of the most important writers in contemporary Japanese literature and also enjoys cult status in the West.
The new novel by the successful Japanese author Haruki Murakami was published in German on his 75th birthday.
As is often the case with Murakami, the main characters move between dream and reality, fantasy and fiction.
In his new story he plays with supernatural elements and on different levels.
A mysterious city behind an insurmountable wall always attracts attention.
Book of the week: Haruki Murakami “The City and its Uncertain Wall”
Haruki Murakami's long-awaited new novel "The City and its Uncertain Wall" is published parallel to his 75th birthday.
© ZUMA Wire/Imago/Dumont (montage)
The nameless first-person narrator, who appears in the book's 600-plus pages, misses the girl who suddenly disappears without explanation after an intimate and romantic year.
“The real me lives in the city with the high wall,” she once said.
Nobody can just get in or out there.
But for him, the 17-year-old, there is a place there as a dream reader.
So begins the young man's search for his lover and a mysterious, fluid transition between worlds.
He finds the strange city and reads old dreams that are piled up in a library every evening.
The love of his life is sitting opposite him - but, painfully, she doesn't recognize him here.
Under mysterious circumstances, the narrator finds himself back in the world beyond the wall.
He moves to Tokyo, works in a bookstore, and has a variety of girlfriends.
The memory of the girl and the walled city haunts him.
Eventually he quits and takes a job in an old library in Fukushima Prefecture.
Reality begins to falter - and the narrator has to ask himself what binds him to this world.
Blurb/Dumont
The novel was written during the pandemic
Murakami, who loves to travel and is often on the road, wrote the novel under the “quite strange and tense conditions” of the pandemic.
“In early March 2020, when the virus began to rage in Japan,” he wrote day after day, barely leaving the house, until he finished the book at the end of 2022, as the author adds in the afterword.
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The origin of the work is an approximately 100-page story of the same name that he published in a magazine after his studies in 1980 - when he was still running a jazz bar in Tokyo.
At the time, Murakami was not convinced by the story and wanted to revise it thoroughly later, as he explains in the afterword.
Because: “The text always bothered me, even disturbed me, like a small bone stuck in my throat.
This little bone was very important for me (as a writer and as a person)”.
But at first things turned out differently, according to the German Press Agency (dpa).
Haruki Murakami: Shadows play an important role
The current novel is all about walls.
Both real and metaphorical.
The author explores the question of how these can be overcome.
Questions about self-discovery are current and the shadow he likes to use takes on a life of its own in the current book.
The protagonist must leave his shadow behind with the strict gatekeeper to gain entry to the city where there is no time and feelings are considered useless.
A dreary existence begins for the shadow; later, severely weakened, he begs to escape together.
This seems to be successful - in any case, the young narrator ends up back in the world beyond the wall under mysterious circumstances.
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Supersensory events occur again and again in the book.
For example, when the main character starts a new beginning in his mid-forties in an old library.
He meets new people, but the memories of the walled city don't leave him alone.
Despite all the supernatural elements, the new Murakami sounds like a kind of balance sheet from the author, who continues to wait for the call from Stockholm.
So far, the Nobel Prize in Literature had not worked out.
Success may be a long-distance run.
This is also reminiscent of Murakami, who often likes to run long distances.
On February 2nd, Thea Dorn will discuss the new Murakami novel with her guests in the “Literary Quartet”.
Fans of the Japanese author should not miss these three novels by Murakami.
Haruki Murakami “The City and its Uncertain Wall”
Translated by Ursula Gräfe
2024 Dumont, ISBN-13 978-3-8321-6839-1
Price: Hardcover €34, e-book €27.99, 640 pages (different format)
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Haruki Murakami: About the author
Born in Kyoto in 1949, Haruki Murakami spent many years in the USA and Europe.
He is a highly honored author who has won the most prestigious literary awards for his numerous novels and short stories.
His works are published in German by DuMont Verlag.
Most recently, the novels “The Assassination of the Commendatore” in two parts (2018), the new translation of “The Chronicles of the Wind-Up Bird” (2020), the short story collection “First Person Singular” (2021), “Murakami T” (2022) and “ Honey Cake” (2023) published.