One of the unique features of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel The City and her unsafe walls (professionally translated by Philip Gabriel, published by Harvill Secker, London, 2024), is the afterword. More than the novel, it was the epilogue in which a seventy -year -old writer justifies his choice so honestly and moved to make readers curious, especially because Murakami had hardly ever taken care of criticism.
One immediately remembers that the Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo OES is deliberately dispensing with his own realm in favor of western images.
One immediately remembers that the Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo OES is deliberately dispensing with his own realm in favor of western images. Murakami’s literary career is full of vitriol, both experienced and amateur critics. Murakami begins with the epilogue: “… but with this novel I think that I need a word of the explanation and follow the literary history of the selected content. From an early amendment with a names similar to the dystopically hard -boiled wonderland and at the end of the world.
Source: Amazon
He illustrates the need to rewrite similar motifs, topics, action lines and characters, if not for anything, but the satisfaction of the novelist. He concludes by repeating the truth that the truth cannot be found in a firm silence, but in a constant change and movement. Isn’t that the typical core of the stories what it is about? ‘It is this, which is difficult to grasp forever, that is difficult and transformative truth that Murakami is looking for in this new novel, which is much expected. With all his characteristic humility and grace, it is the subtle request of a more mature writer to convince his readers to give him the chance to perfect his craft.
Divided into three parts, the novel follows his lover in a typical story by Murakami First Person, the striving of the male protagonist. In the afterword, Murakami mentions how to write the novel enabled him with the urgently needed consolation and security during the Covid19 pandemic. When the world was devastated from the invisible forces of an invisible deadly virus, it was one of the only ways to venture into a well -known novel room to keep mental health and faith.
When the world was devastated from the invisible forces of an invisible deadly virus, it was one of the only ways to venture into a well -known novel room to keep mental health and faith.
Similarly, the two protagonists of the novel are hardworking to develop an imaginary city in careful details in order to escape the attempts to escape difficulties, fear and pain of their monotonous existence. However, the city is not the utopia that is imagined. In an interview with the New Yorker, Murakami explains the metonymic dimensions of the imaginary city as the “worldwide pandemic closure”, in which he explains the impossibility of “extreme isolation and warm feelings of empathy”.
Dreams and shadows in Murakami to read the city and its uncertain walls
So there are people who live in impoverished minimalism, mere mussels of who could be, satisfied with tired blunt clothes and nominal food. They were transformed into apathetic machines that never question their less happy situations. I never wonder what lies above this obsessive innerity. A security guard that is passionate about the “uncertain walls” and proudly explained the unexpected time of magic in his creation.
Source: Amazon
As soon as someone enters the city, the shadow is torn apart, which then carries and dies painful death. Even the peace -loving unicorns forget their beef wood and fight every year without failure against brutal deaths. As soon as you enter, you cannot leave peaceful measures. And slowly your will to let go of it too. An imaginary city then becomes an instrument to criticize people’s exclusion practices, their intentional detention and their indifference to violence and death.
He continues: “The image of a city surrounded by high walls can reflect this situation, of things that are blocked and disabled”, and intelligent readers immediately understand the contemporary relevance of similar nations and intellectual states. Here the narrator is involved in reading and deciphering old dreams that obviously belong to previous citizens because the existing hollow, do not have this capacity. Dreams, often strongly sexual, were a familiar motif in Murakami’s fiction. The self, which is tortured in rejection, usually finds sexual and spiritual liberation from these dreams – and acts as bridges between the individual and its esteem/longed for others.
“Believe in your other’s existence”
The second part, in which the narrator is miraculous in a library in a remote mountain town, is the favorite section. The intense cold, the snow -capped paths, the secret room with the fireplace of apple wood and the blurred dimensions of the spiritual and human world – connects everything to weave typical Murakami magic. When Matthew Stecher speaks of Murakami’s magical realism, he writes: “In almost his entire fiction … a realistic narrative is created, then disturbed … by the bizarre or the magical”.
Stecher describes the “two worlds” of Murakami as “consciousness” and “unconsciousness”. The “unconscious” is obviously the part in which the so -called “magical” elements develop and dominated by pictures of darkness, chill and inertia.
Stecher describes the “two worlds” of Murakami as “consciousness” and “unconsciousness”. The “unconscious” is obviously the part in which the so -called “magical” elements develop and dominated by pictures of darkness, chill and inertia. Murakami talks about this unconscious and calls it the “Black Box”, which is reminiscent of Brian Mchahal’s description of the Chinese boxes, as “the effect of the interruption and complication of the ontological horizon of fiction, the multiplication of its worlds and the task of the process of world establishment”.
Source: opinion, the edge
However, Murakami puts up a dilemma in this novel: What is the “real self” and which is his counterpart – “the unconscious”/”The Shadow”? In the same interview, Murakami asked: “Where does our real self exist? Where is their meaning? What kind of place is the real world? Do we have any decisions there? ‘With all the existential fear and crises, however, Murakami offers its characters the agency to navigate the two areas, and claim that you really have to “want” to find out the way out of yourself.
With typical Murakamic images that readers who are familiar with his style, the new novel is easy to read, at the same time fascinating and annoying. The letter has undoubtedly developed and the extent of the narrative has expanded to include several topics and ideas. However, one wishes the raw, unprecedented charm of his first works. In the end, the seventy -seventy -year -old master no longer really has to prove his genius, his oeuvre is self -explanatory.
