The City and Its Uncertain Walls

It's twice in a week where I have read a book by an author I love and been a little bit underwhelmed. It's not that I don't know what I am getting with Murakami as I think I have read virtually everything that has been published in English but this didn't work for me at all. The main reason is that, despite pulling on many of the trope's familiar to Murakami's readers this book is simply boring and a slog to get through.

I always liked Murakami's 'ordinary protagonists doing ordinary things' in fantastical settings. I love his juxtaposition between the daily grind of Tokyo life by men who focus on what they are cooking for dinner whose grades at school were not too good and not too bad and the dream like fantastical nature of the strange ideas, concepts and characters they come across. So much of his work ask us to look beyond (or into?) the mundane and see world's of wonder. His books are like escaping a prison.

This book though, in many ways, is about the internal prisons we put up with in our subconscious and whilst it is a chore to get through and I did read it all, I was unsatisfied. I think this is because it never really mattered whether a character was in the prison of their making, or reality. The greatest sin of a book that asks us to think deeply and reflect is that it must not be boring, and 'The City and its Uncertain Walls' is that.

I find myself not really caring for the main character, who in his teens falls in love with a girl, who one day breaks off all contact with him. A scenario perhaps not so unfamiliar. Except the girl tells him she is a shadow and the 'real' her lives in a town and works in a library. The main character has a sort of desire to reach this town (and to be honest, even the idea of a journey or an arrival is downplayed). I think there is some kind of idea that this town is inside our subconscious, and it's actually a bleak place. In the book it certainly isn't interesting.

The second half of the book sees the main character move to a rural town and pick up a job in a library. The book doesn't say so, but we are in this scenario of a middle aged man still pining for a 16 year old girl and I am guessing he is having a mid-life crisis. There are parts of the book which show promise here, such as the nature of the custodian of the library and the owner of a coffee shop (she's the most interesting character in the book for me and I would have loved to see more of that relationship develop). There is a story arc late in the book which reads quite difficult and it leaves the reader with no other choice but to see the main character as a little pathetic, and dare I say, not a nice person. I'd given up on him bumbling around the novel with no purpose by now.