Haruki Murakami’s new novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls is at times thought-provoking, nostalgic and beautiful. However it ultimately falls short of being anything more than a circuitous pseudo-philosophical snoozefest.

The novel is an expansion of a novella Murakami first penned over four decades ago, but sadly it’s not worth the wait. Like the protagonist who spends a lifetime pining over his first love and waiting for answers about what went wrong, the reader keeps hoping for a payoff or climax to the novel that never arrives. Granted, this may well be Murakami’s point about life and love: but it doesn’t make for enjoyable or fulfilling reading.

The plot of The City and Its Uncertain Walls centres around a man who fell in love deeply as a teenager. It doesn’t work out and he doesn’t know why, spending the majority of the rest of his life as a solitary man who can’t feel real love for any new woman. There are hints of many literary and cinematographic works in this novel, and it brought to mind Dante’s pure love for Beatrice in the Divine Comedy as well as Kafka’s (far greater work) The Castle.

The despair of the protagonist is palpable as he reckons with the unexplained departure of the girl he loved and faces a future where he never feels near this level of connection again. Murakami is at his strongest when describing the depression and grief of his heartbroken main character:

Nobody tells you where to go now. No one consoles you or encourages you. It wouldn’t help even if they did. You’re left utterly alone in a desolate land. Not a single tree or blade of grass to be seen … you’ve been mercilessly excluded from a world of warmth, isolated with thoughts that have no outlet lying heavy like a lump of lead inside you.

As a teenager, the girl the protagonist was enamoured with informed him of a mysterious town surrounded by a high wall and said her “real” self lived there and he was only in love with her “shadow.” When she disappears on him, the narrative begins moving back and forth from the town to the “real world,” blurring the lines between reality and illusion, identity, time, romantic love and the meaning of life. A parallel storyline and additional characters are then worked in to delve deeper into making meaning of the whole cosmic soup of the plot. 

With such fascinating thematic material to work with, Murakami accomplishes quite a feat by managing to make the book ploddingly dull, repetitive and uninspiring. Echoes between the mysterious timeless world and the mundane reality of the protagonist raise interesting questions about where everything is leading. The answer, it turns out, is that it is leading to ever more pedantic and indulgent metaphors, schizoid philosophical pondering and a lack of anything really happening to hold the reader’s interest. Falling in deep holes for unknown reasons and ending up in another dimension, unicorns, libraries with no books, love stories that never go anywhere? There’s plenty of that. Actual progression of the narrative, action or a literary pulse beyond the quasi-comatose? Look elsewhere, reader.

The events and ideas of the novel are restated countless times in an almost autistic way, and conversations between the characters often feel like you’re reading some kind of exchange between robots. Echoes between the other world and the mundane world are shunted in repeatedly to the extent that it becomes almost embarrassing. Mundane details of life in both worlds become nauseating in their repetition. At a certain point, hearing about the niceties of herbal tea preparation and the joys of sitting in front of a cozy wood stove becomes downright excessive.

As The City and Its Uncertain Walls wends its way to what amounts to a conclusion, we get a subplot around blueberry muffins, a skirt-wearing ghost and a strange boy who wears a yellow submarine parka. Reading on in hopes of finally achieving that “aha” moment, the reader is instead met with a mysterious night time biting of the protagonist’s earlobe that accomplishes part of some kind of spiritual identity-fusion process. Trying to verify whether this incident really happened the protagonist asks a new crush at the local cafe: 

“Would you mind touching my earlobe?”

“It’s a big, soft earlobe,” she said, as if envious. “Mine are so small and hard, seedy looking.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You touching them makes me feel a lot better.” 

When not exploring the intimacy of earlobe fondling, the book obsesses over what’s real, what constitutes a true individual identity and the nature of time, space and destiny. The reader sometimes feels similarly: did this book really happen or is it some kind of joke or part of a fever dream I had when I was ill with the flu?

As the storylines of the book converge, Murakami issues another central pronouncement of the book, writing that “reality is something you have to choose yourself, out of several possible alternatives.” The book ends up feeling like talking to somebody who’s too convinced by the simulation theory or watched the Matrix too many times and is now having some kind of manic meltdown about how everything is in your head, man.

In the excellent new film Heretic, a fanatical atheist named Mr. Reed (played by Hugh Grant) traps two young LDS missionaries in his home and tries to “prove” he’s correct about everyone living in a giant simulation. He does so through a series of deadly stunts and mind games. As the missionary Sister Paxton played by Chloe East eventually says to Reed when he repeatedly and ham-handedly tries to force her to believe reality is all a mental construct: “I just don’t agree.”

The primary highlight of this book for me, was in seeing that even a legendary writer such as Murakami can fall far short of greatness despite the heights of some of his former works like Kafka on the Shore and A Wild Sheep Chase. This sloppy, gruelling book shows that any writer with true skill and something important to say deserves his or her own share of the spotlight as well, not just those with widespread name recognition. 

As Murakami emphasises at one point in the seminal message of the book: “never give up believing. If you can believe strongly, deeply in something, the road ahead will become clear. And then you can prevent the terrible inevitable fall to come, or at least cushion the shock of it.”