New novel for your birthday
By Yuriko Wahl-Immel (dpa)
Thu, January 11, 2024 at 11:17 a.m
cultural
On Haruki Murakami’s birthday, his new novel “The City and its Uncertain Wall” is being published in this country – the story of an undying love and a mysterious place at the end of the world.
Cologne/Tokyo (dpa) – She is sixteen, he is seventeen and madly in love. A tender relationship, sometime and somewhere in Japan. The best-selling author Haruki Murakami weaves a fascinating love and life story in his new novel “The City and its Uncertain Wall” and blurs the real and surreal worlds.
The title will be released in this country exactly on the Japanese writer’s 75th birthday this Friday (January 12th) – and as is often the case with Murakami, the protagonists move between dream, reality, fantasy and fiction. Murakami is one of the most important authors of contemporary Japanese literature and also enjoys cult status in the West.
His new story plays with the supernatural on several levels and again and again a mysterious city behind an insurmountable wall captivates. The first-person narrator, who remains nameless throughout the 600-plus pages, longs for the girl who, after an intimate and romantic year, suddenly disappears without explanation. “The real me lives in the city with the high walls,” 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.
And so the adolescent’s search for his beloved begins 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.
The novel was written during the pandemic
Murakami, who loves to travel and travels a lot, wrote the novel under the “rather strange and tense conditions” of the pandemic. “At the beginning of March 2020, when the virus began to rage in Japan,” he started, wrote day after day, hardly left the house until he finished the book at the end of 2022, as the author adds in the afterword.
Unusual: The origin of the work is an approximately 100-page story of the same name, which 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 bothered me, like a small bone stuck in my throat. This small bone was very important for me (as a writer and as a person).”
But at first things turned out differently. Murakami wrote a few novels, but his breakthrough came with “Naoko’s Smile” in 1987. Dozens of titles followed. Murakami’s books – translated into more than 40 languages - are read by millions of people worldwide. Most recently, “The Murder of the Commendatore” (2018), “The Chronicles of the Wind-Up Bird” (2020) and “First Person Singular” (2021) also landed at the top of the German bestseller lists. Some works have been made into films.
Shadows play an important role in the new novel
Murakami sheds light on walls – both real and metaphorical – and how to overcome them. Philosophical questions about the soul, self-discovery and the subconscious resonate. The shadow is also important, this time it takes on a life of its own. 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.
He moves to Tokyo, studies listlessly, then works long hours in the bookstore, has a few meaningless relationships, and feels lonely and empty. In his mid-forties he decides to start over and takes a job in an old library – far away in a small town in Fukushima Prefecture. And again supernatural and supernatural events occur. Unusual people become the pillars of his life – and the walled city never lets him go.
Murakami is relieved to have completed the novel
The writer, who also lived in the USA and Europe for a long time and is influenced by Western culture, has received numerous awards. Last fall he was awarded the prestigious Asturias Prize for Literature because he combined the heritage of Western culture with Japanese tradition. He was often considered a possible Nobel Prize winner for literature. But so far the call from Stockholm hasn’t come.
The star author lives in Tokyo, where a Murakami library has been set up at the elite Waseda University – with books, manuscripts, translations from his pen and records from his enormous collection. The long-distance runner has completed dozens of marathons, is a baseball fan and says he stacks all kinds of T-shirts – especially from his travels – folded into boxes.
At the end of the new book, which also contains humor and quick-witted dialogues, it sounds a bit like a review of the author, who has been writing for around 45 years. Murakami writes that he is relieved that he was now able to complete the original story in a new form. And: “The truth does not lie in unchanging standstill, but in constant change. That is the essence of storytelling, as I see it.”
Haruki Murakami, The City and its Uncertain Wall, DuMont Cologne, translated from Japanese by Ursula Gräfe, 640 pages, ISBN 978-3-8321-6839-1
© dpa-infocom, dpa:240111-99-566604/3
2024-01-11 16:41:33
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