---
product_id: 612227973
title: "The City and Its Uncertain Walls: A Novel"
brand: "haruki murakamiphilip gabriel"
price: "VT15390"
currency: VUV
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 4
url: https://www.desertcart.vu/products/612227973-the-city-and-its-uncertain-walls-a-novel
store_origin: VU
region: Vanuatu
---

# The City and Its Uncertain Walls: A Novel

**Brand:** haruki murakamiphilip gabriel
**Price:** VT15390
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** The City and Its Uncertain Walls: A Novel by haruki murakamiphilip gabriel
- **How much does it cost?** VT15390 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.vu](https://www.desertcart.vu/products/612227973-the-city-and-its-uncertain-walls-a-novel)

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## Description

The City and Its Uncertain Walls: A Novel

## Images

![The City and Its Uncertain Walls: A Novel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91TXmi4Y4UL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Between Books and Dreams
*by J***D on December 28, 2024*

“You were the one who told me about the town.”… tells the unnamed narrator, as the story starts, then a 17 year old boy, while “you” is an unnamed girl one year younger. In the midst of the Summer they both wander along a river without their shoes. No words between them but for describing the town, not large, but not small enough to be described shortly. It is surrounded by a wall, a river crosses the land from East to West and can be crossed through three bridges, the East one, the Old one and the West one. There is a library and a watchtower, an abandoned foundry and communal housing. The girl claim that the real her lives there in the library while the girl seating next to the narrator in the grass on the bank of the river is just a mere shadow. To enter the town one has to split from one’s shadow. In the town, time exists, days and nights alternate, there are seasons, living people, living strange animals called the beast, a sort of poor unicorns, who die in the cold of Winter and thrive again in the Spring. Still, time has no meaning, the watchtower clock has no handle. People seem to live in eternity.“There’s always a place ready for you there,” you said….”You’ll become a Dream Reader,”From the first chapter of the first of the three parts of the book, the story is set. A Dream Reader! And the real me of the girl will be there to help him in his task. All along the book, the narrator is an unnamed man whom the story follows from age 16 until his early 40’s. He is a solitary character, who stays a bachelor during this period. He tells the story from his point of view from the first to the last word of the book. And we, readers, follow him in his solitary life back and forth between the mysterious city and his life in Japan with few acquaintances. We follow him first in the megapolis of Tokyo, working with books in a Publishing company, then in the small town of Z** of Aizu, an hour away by a slow local train from the station of Aizuwakamatsu, in the inland mountains of the region between Fukushima and Sendai, as the Head Librarian of the city library. As usual with Murakami, the story flows peacefully with many details, like a river, alternating descriptions with dialogues, a slow wandering along the banks, a bridge, the interior of a house, a navy blue coat, a small coffee shop close to the train station, and then a tiny, unassuming detail switches the story to another level, where logic and plain reality interfere with what could be fantasy but is accepted as a parallel world with its own rules and own logic. And it would be unfair to disclose the wonderful surprises the reader has to get along with as the story unfold. Shadows and real people live sometimes separated or reunited. Love stories unfold unfinished, leaving space to imagination, drama don’t look so dire in view of the parallel world always present in the background. Dreams and rationality are entangled strangely, like the vortices of the flowing water. Books are part of these two parallel worlds and the passages from one track to the other exist but are reserved to few “qualified” people. Very few characters have names. Oki, a trusted colleague of the narrator in the Tokyo publishing company, who manages contacts with the country libraries. Mr Komatsu, a real estate agent who introduces our narrator to his new home in Z**. Mrs Soeda of the city Z**, is a wise and empathic woman in charge of the daily management of the library, or the previous Head Librarian. At last, there is Mr 易森 Koyasu, with an unusual name, helping our narrator to adjust in his new task in Z**, and whom, as we slowly discover is both alive and dead, depending which of the universe we are in. Other characters are described otherwise, the young woman at the coffee shop, the Gatekeeper, the Yellow Submarine boy, the unnamed girl, in her role as the librarian of dreams in the walled city. This library shelters the old dreams kept in a kind of big egg shaped box that the Dream Reader has to gently tame to allow the shy dream to express itself. Emphasise is given to characters with unusual problem. The nonsocial, nonspeaking boy (probably autistic who knows?), with a fantastic capacity for reading and memorising books all day long, with the Yellow Submarine parka, who mysteriously disappears from his home, leaving behind a worried family of rational and loving people. The young woman from the coffee shop unable to have sex because of a terrible pain during intercourse (probably suffering from endometriosis who knows?). If you, reader, expect a full circle love story, like in the wonderful book 1Q84, you might be disappointed. No love story ending, neither in drama nor in happiness, all loves in this story eventually disappear from the story, like these Iranian rivers flowing from the mountains around and ending their course evaporating in the central hot desert. Interactions are regulated by the timelessness of the city surrounded by this impenetrable wall. Entering or exiting the city is essentially impossible and only very few exceptions, precisely few important characters of the story, are passing the big wall, a bit like a metaphor of the “tunnelling effect” in Quantum Physics. This story is a dream, and the reader is asked to imitate the Dream Reader, “to held the old dream […] in both palms as I gently, cautiously, and coaxed the dream to emerge”.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Not a Favorite
*by T***H on March 25, 2025*

I am a great admirer of Mr. Murakami. He’s written some of my favorite novels, including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, and 1Q84. With this novel, however, though I see some of the technique that makes him the writer he is, I was not left feeling satisfied.Some of this is explained in the afterword. I did not know this before reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls but, apparently, this is his third variation of a story that he came up with near the beginning of his career. I have never read the original story it is based on (with an identical title except for a comma after “city”) nor have I read the variation entitled Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I will certainly go back to these at some point. Perhaps they will offer me some insight into this.Still, having said that, a novel must stand on its own and this doesn’t really do that for me. The man who narrates this story for us seems much like the protagonist of other Murakami novels, but his existence seems much more tenuous. I like the shadow/substance dichotomy. I connect with his longing for a girl he knew and his leaving his job to become a librarian in the distant town, but the doppelganger he meets in the walled city is a non-entity and the rushed ending with the strange boy in the parka didn’t work.In the end, there are moments and passages I like. And yet, overall, I found this to be less impactful and more forgettable than anything else I’ve read by Murakami.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Mind and its Uncertain Borders
*by B***N on May 7, 2025*

I suppose most of us take our selves to be open minded. It takes one "issue" -- political, economic, emotional, aspirational, personal, national, or whatever pulls at your heart -- and another person that has a conviction opposed to our own, to bring to light the uncertain walls in our own minds. Is that why many in the West are resolute to not discuss politics or religion or money?No matter how tall and seemingly indestructible, let's be glad those walls are uncertain. The question is why are they so tall? Who built them? How did they come about? What is inside and what is outside? Where do we really want to be? Are we free to choose anyhow? What does it take to go to the other side, even if we can't bring down those walls. And why can't we? Wait, maybe we can, why not? And, then, are we really bound by those walls? Who or what bound us?Murakami doesn't answer those questions that matter the most. He doesn't even ask them specifically. But, he hints at them in all kinds of subtle and gently ways masquerading as a love story between two older and awkward teenagers. Losing the beloved, growing up and going on with life and having that brief experience of joy only revisited in the rearview mirror. Not even daring to hope and recover that lost love is itself a parable for life, isn't it? But dare we shall.

## Frequently Bought Together

- The City and Its Uncertain Walls: A Novel
- James: A Novel
- Intermezzo: A Novel

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*Product available on Desertcart Vanuatu*
*Store origin: VU*
*Last updated: 2026-03-07*