This is how Haruki Murakamiin his new novel, The city and its uncertain wallsdescribes the magical creatures that live in the unusual city of the book’s title: In autumn, in anticipation of the approaching cold season, the bodies of the beasts were covered with shiny, golden fur.. And this is how, in his novel The end of the world and a ruthless wonderlandpublished in Japan in 1985 and translated into English in 1991, Murakami describes for the first time the mythical unicorns in that book: “With the arrival of autumn, a layer of long golden fur grows over their bodies.”.
A trumpet sounds over the people, in both novels, and the beasts, in The end of the world… “look up, as if in response to primordial memories,” while in the new novel, the animals look up to old memories.
As the books were translated from Japanese by different translators (Philip Gabriel for The city…Alfred Birnbaum para The end of the world… is it possible that these passages were identical at first, but be that as it may, I am not accusing Murakami of self-plagiarism: The repetitions are intended.
The city and its uncertain walls takes place, in part, in the same enigmatic city that appeared in The end of the world…. There are some small differences, but otherwise no changes. Furthermore, the first 120 pages of The city and its uncertain walls they retell the story of the previous work: a nameless narrator enters the city, without knowing how he arrived; his shadow is removed (no one can enter the city with an intact shadow); he has his eyes altered to become the Dream Reader (an enigmatic job that is assigned to him but that he does not understand); learn the ins and outs of this mysterious place; draw a map of the area; conspires with his shadow to escape; He reaches a tunnel through which he can leave – and finally decides to stay, telling his shadow to continue without him.
The details of the narrator’s story differ, but the plot points, measure for measure, are the same. In an epilogue to the new novel, Murakami explains how this setting has been part of his literary imagination since the beginning of his career. In 1980, shortly after his first novel, Listen to the song of the windwon an important award, published a long story with the same title as this novel. He was not satisfied with the result and never published it again in book form. Instead, he incorporated the idea into what became The end of the world and a ruthless wonderland. But the city was only the setting for half of the novel and Murakami he must have thought that this magical place still had untapped narrative possibilities. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees will largely determine his or her assessment of The city and its uncertain walls.
In the end of the worldthe city (despite the title of the new book, the city is almost never referred to as such) only existed in the mind of the protagonist, as a result of a surgical operation to split consciousness similar to the process explored in the television series Severance. In The city and its uncertain wallsis about a fictional land invented by two teenagers in love. Although the city is the same, this novel has nothing to do with the previous one.
The summer in which the anonymous narrator turns 17, he meets a 16-year-old girl and they fall delicately in love. She tells him stories of a “town surrounded by a high wall,” as they say instead of a real name. She claims to have lived there and escaped, but in reality she is not a person, just a shadow. The narrator becomes enthralled with this girl/shadow (also unnamed) and the world she describes. Shortly after they meet, the girl disappears, a familiar trope in the work of Murakami.
The narrator ages but never recovers from the sudden loss of his young love. Somehow, more than a decade later, he wakes up one day in a hole in a city surrounded by a high wall and finds his lost love working in the library. She is 16 years old and does not remember it; No one in the town remembers anything of the time spent outside the walls. She is the reason he decides to stay and lets his shadow escape without him.
Once the shadow is gone, the narrator awakens back into our usual world (the logic of these transportations remains unexplained). Why has he returned? And what are you going to do now that you’re back? While trying to answer those questions, he encounters a ghost, a boy genius, cats, jazz, classical music, and all the other elements usually found in a novel. Murakami.
At 70 years old, Murakami He has been an eternal contender for the Nobel Prize and a great influence on contemporary fiction around the world. His imagination is unique, and his mix of pop culture, postmodernism and Japanese mythology It is a unique contribution to literature. But 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.
When interviewing Murakami In the Paris Review in 2004, novelist John Wray described to the author what he considered his narrative “obsessions”: “A man has been abandoned by the object of his desire, or has lost it in some other way, and finds himself dragged by his inability to forget her to a parallel world that seems to offer him the possibility of recovering what he has lost, a possibility that life as he (and the reader) knows it will never be able to offer him.
Devoted readers of Murakami They know these obsessions too well and could feel that a stagnation is taking over them here. Perhaps those least familiar with Murakami May you be as enchanted by their worlds as I was once and I hope to be again in the future.
* Jonathan Russell Clark has written about books for Esquire, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He is the author of Skateboard y An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.
(The Washington Post)
