{"id":3368,"date":"2025-10-12T18:42:34","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T02:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3368"},"modified":"2025-10-12T18:42:34","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T02:42:34","slug":"review-the-city-and-its-uncertain-walls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3368","title":{"rendered":"Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Man, this book. I really enjoyed it, but it is a ride. Haruki Murakami does a thing in The City and Its Uncertain Walls<\/em> that I have a hard time describing, but that I really enjoyed. This is very keyed to who I am as a reader, so if this doesn’t sound like fun to you when I describe it, it probably won’t be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a book that’s very metaphorical and metafictional and inhabits a magical reality. Murakami is not coy about this. His characters are largely readers and librarians and his POV character directly says how much he admires the genre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this reader, the metafiction and magical realism are slippery. I do love a book with levels of interpretation, but symbolism and metaphor are fragile. It’s a bold way to tell stories because there’s no net. If too many strands of symbolism and metaphor fray or fail to connect, the reader drops. Doing this across cultures (Murakami is Japanese and I’m not) is even harder. Other authors have dropped me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I should probably also say that I went into City<\/em> without knowing anything about it beyond its cover blurb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel is divided into 3 books, each a different time in our narrator’s life, connected by his relationship to and from the titular city. Though which city the title refers to is probably also open to some interpretation; it’s that kind of book. Each of these books are rewarding in their own right and in their interconnection. The narrator is engaging even though he’s carrying a lot of symbolic weight. The settings and situations are evocative and engaging. The writing is beautiful, even when the meaning is obscure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the meaning is often obscure. Even within a book the connections and interpretations can feel tenuous. Reaching between the books feels more so as the characters change and new characters come and go. How a character relates to an idea changes as they do, and this manifests indirectly in this work. Except when it’s explicit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This kind of interpretive juggling is fun for me, so I really enjoyed myself throughout. By the end, I’m still putting pieces together and looking forward to considering the whole thing from different angles and deciding what I think about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I read the Afterword and I feel like the whole thing changed again. I have no idea if that was Murakami’s intention or not. This is the kind of book where small changes in a reader’s frame of mind can create big shifts, so it might be that a couple words in the Afterword catalyzed a big change in how I thought about the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, a ride. And a fun one, honestly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A must.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Man, this book. I really enjoyed it, but it is a ride. Haruki Murakami does a thing in The City and Its Uncertain Walls that I have a hard time describing, but that I really enjoyed. This is very keyed to who I am as a reader, so if this doesn’t sound like fun to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3368"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3371,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3368\/revisions\/3371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}