The City and Its Uncertain Walls Audiobook By Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator cover art

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

A Novel

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The City and Its Uncertain Walls

By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
Narrated by: Brian Nishii
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About this listen

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A REAL SIMPLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

"Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction."—The New York Times • "More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world."—San Francisco Chronicle • "Murakami is masterful."—Los Angeles Times

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.

"Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn't this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?”—Haruki Murakami, from the afterword

©2024 Haruki Murakami (P)2024 Random House Audio
Editors Select Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Magical Realism City Paranormal

Critic reviews

“It is with unabashed joy that I am here to report: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Murakami’s first novel in six years, is also one of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling. The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a paean to books, reading, and libraries, an investigation into the relationship between romance and realism, and a timely fable about how relationships, societies, and communities both protect themselves against threats and foster beauty and truth.”—Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe

“Spellbinding. . . . [An] oddly irresistible fable. . . . [The] eerie landscape of snows, forests and torrents is beautifully evoked as Mr. Murakami the seasoned storyteller of loss, loneliness and passing time takes charge. The action dawdles, then leaps, with a trademark blend of soap opera and sublimity. In deadpan, slow-burn, quietly hypnotic prose, delicately conveyed in Mr. Gabriel’s translation, our narrator settles into a becalmed life as guardian of the small-town library stacks. . . . Mr. Murakami understands these parallel territories of the mind not simply as escapism but as a precious refuge for those who ‘had never put down roots in this world.’ He conjures the charm, and also the harm, of all-consuming obsessions. In the perfect walled town, no cats prowl, because ‘nothing unneeded’ can exist there.”—Boyd Tonkin, The Wall Street Journal

“[Murakami’s] imagination is one of a kind, and his blend of pop culture, postmodernism and Japanese mythology is a wholly unique contribution to literature.”—Jonathan Russell Clark, The Washington Post

Editorial Review

A love letter to creation and creativity, 40 years in the making
There’s no arguing that Haruki Murakami is one of the most brilliant creative minds and writers of the 21st century. And for fans, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is not only long-awaited, but also fits beautifully into his literary legacy—expanding on a 40-year-old short story of the same name, and acting as a companion to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. While the motifs, moments, and world all feel familiar, The City and Its Uncertain Walls still stands wholly on its own. As always, it’s impossible not to get lost in Murakami’s creation or narrator Brian Nishii’s performance. It’s not just a love letter to magical realism, creativity, and writing, but also reflects the author’s own experience with his craft—as a labor of love that was 40 years in the making, and was most definitely worth the wait. — Michael C., Audible Editor

What listeners say about The City and Its Uncertain Walls

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Amazing surreal storytelling

Savor like a fine scotch with a splash of mineral water. A story of grief, loss, despair and other dimensions. Visits from ghosts and becoming disconnected with your own shadow, finding that the past and future do not exist.
Jazz music and freshly baked blueberry muffins, sitting by an old stove on a cold day.
A story that is maybe better read than listened to, but I’m thankful for the option.

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outstanding, his best

I really feel like this is a culmination of Murakami's entire career as a writer. A masterpiece.

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Desperately needs editing

I love Murakami but found this book so disappointing. Part I was good, but it was also the 3rd time he had written it in a different form. It got progressively worse from there, horribly repetitive with no purpose, and ended without a point. He should have just stuck with revisions to the original story; this triptych lessens the quality and impact of the first portion of the book. Such a shame.

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Murakami Strikes Again!

Excellent read. Part 1 is almost a recap of Wonderland. Part 2 and 3 continue the story. If you’re a Murakami fan, you will enjoy.

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Story and Narrator

The story is not up to the author’s usual sophistication or interconnection of elements. I was a little awash at first.

Also, it was distracting when, much of the time, the word “library”, which was a central element of the story, was mispronounced as “liberry” over and over.

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The City and its Uncertain Walls

The reader’s voice was pleasant and not overly dramatic. Clearly intelligent, as well.
Still leaves room to read this book for oneself.

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Extraordinary Writing

While this novel evolved over 40 years from a short novella, I read it as a fan of Murakami for the past 35 years. The story unfolds,with its iconic jazz references, continually emphasizing time, memory, and the contemporary notion of awareness. Undoubtedly there’s much to be said about this novel. But having just finished it, I believe this is a book that speaks to many dimensions of experience and existence, Classic Murakami but also a literary master pushing his craft beyond his own literary history. Extraordinary.

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Beautifuly read and written.

Murakami has a sound and a feel that will either resonate deeply with you or not. It is worth everyone's time to find the art that makes them feel something in addition to admiration and for me this story did that.

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Easily One of His Best, Maybe Even the Best

I re-listened to "Hard Boiled Wonderland" in the days leading up to the release of "The City and Its Uncertain Walls." That was the first Murakami novel I had ever finished. Maybe it was because I was still new to his style, or because of the way I used to listen to audiobooks back then, but I came to find it was much better than I had remembered. Nevertheless, I can say with a good deal of confidence that, after having finished "The City," it stands beside its predecessor as a more mature work that is just as (if not more) finely crafted.

Inevitably, some Murakami fans will take umbrage with anyone stating that this is better than whichever book they fervently hold in their heart as his best. And I can see why some people may accuse this book as feeling like a retread. I however had a number of moments where I felt as though it could almost be something like Nabokov's "Look at the Harlequins;" where Nabokov lovingly revisits the characters and ideas throughout his career, but gives them slightly different names. It's a tough call, given how this is a translation and all, but anyways.

The earlier chapters of Book 2 may feel slower than how things progress in Book 1. But never fear- the seemingly "slow" moments of this book, (like in "Wind-Up Bird" and "Kafka,") pay off very well, and I suspect will stand out as being even better on a 2nd go-through.

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Master Murakami

The kaleidoscope of Murakami’s world is in full display; echoes and shadows of all the archetypal forms he procures are rendered flawlessly. Thank you for the continued contribution to your life’s work library.

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