Review: A Novel About Walls, Both Literal and Figurative

Author Haruki Murakami offers a potent reminder of the value of free movement.

Haruki Murakami's latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, explores the shifting boundaries of identity, using surreal cityscapes to explore borders both literal and figurative. The novel unfolds as a meditation on how people transform when crossing lines—whether physical, metaphysical, psychological, or cultural.

Characters that readers of Kafka on the Shore and his other books will find familiar—a gentle loner, a melancholy girl, an odd librarian—wonder whether their environment is the key to liberating their true selves. Murakami's latest is a powerful reminder: Freedom to move is freedom to become.

Comments

[Mickey Rat]

The author also happens to come from perhaps the most homogeneous cultures which least accepting of people permanently crossing it's border.

[mad.casual]

It's also notably oxymoronic about how people who lament uncultured backwoods hicks' inability to move outside their borders mentally even if they do move outside their borders physically (because heaven forbid anyone ever learn how to move inside a border mentally even though that's how borders work), forget or assume that moving across borders physically doesn't intrinsically move you across borders mentally or spiritually.

Like if a Japanese person leaves Japan, they inevitably intellectually and spiritually transform into something other than Japanese automatically, but if someone stays in Japan, they cannot possibly become, spiritually or intellectually, anything other than just Japanese.

It's a weird sort of magic dirt as manifest destiny determinism.