
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Brian Nishii
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
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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
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Story
With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.
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What's better than Murakami? More Murakami
- By Dr. Curmudgeon on 04-11-14
By: Haruki Murakami
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Miss Kim Knows
- And Other Stories
- By: Cho Nam-joo, Jamie Chang - translator
- Narrated by: Mei Mei Macleod
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Written in Cho Nam-joo’s signature razor-sharp prose, Miss Kim Knows follows eight women as they confront how gender shapes and orders their lives. A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman is gaslit. A woman is discriminated against at work. A woman grows old. A woman becomes famous. A woman is hated, and loved, and then hated again. As with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, these microcosmic stories prove eerily relatable under Cho Nam-joo’s precise, unveiled gaze, offering another captivating read from an essential voice in fiction.
By: Cho Nam-joo, and others
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South of the Border, West of the Sun
- A Novel
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Eric Loren
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in 1951 in an affluent Tokyo suburb, Hajime - beginning in Japanese - has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an enviable career as the proprietor of two jazz clubs. Yet a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his success threatens Hajime's happiness. And a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl named Shimamoto clouds his heart.
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A River of Unmindfulness
- By Darwin8u on 10-12-13
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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Norwegian Wood
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: John Chancer
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.
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Sorry, but I didn't like the narrator.
- By Kelly McCarty on 10-30-15
By: Haruki Murakami
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The Mermaid from Jeju
- By: Sumi Hahn
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay, Raymond J. Lee
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In the aftermath of World War II, Goh Junja is a girl just coming into her own. She is the latest successful deep-sea diver in her family. She urges her mother to allow her to make their annual trip to Mt. Halla, where they trade sea delicacies for pork. A sea-village girl, Junja has never been to the mountains, where it smells like mushrooms and earth, and it is there she falls in love with mountain-boy Yang Suwol. But when Junja returns one day later, it is just in time to see her mother take her last breath, beaten by the waves during a dive she was taking in Junja's place.
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Male reader ruins the book
- By Shana Theobald on 06-01-23
By: Sumi Hahn
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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor, Ellen Archer
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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The 24 stories that make up Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman generously express the incomparable Haruki Murakami’s mastery of the form. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an ice man, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things for which we might wish. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit Murakami’s ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and entertaining.
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Fantastic, just like how all Murakami books are
- By MM on 05-05-15
By: Haruki Murakami
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Ashes of Spring
- By: Mieko Kawakami, Hitomi Yoshio - translator
- Narrated by: Sura Siu
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning Japanese author and poet Mieko Kawakami brings Ashes of Spring, a collection of short stories set in everyday life in Japan just before the pandemic lockdown.
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Ashes of Spring
- By Anonymous User on 04-10-25
By: Mieko Kawakami, and others
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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage
- A novel
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Bruce Locke
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The new novel - a book that sold more than a million copies the first week it went on sale in Japan - from the internationally acclaimed author, his first since IQ84. Here he gives us the remarkable story of Tsukuru Tazaki, a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present. It is a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages.
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Great book ruined by the narration
- By David on 08-14-14
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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Sputnik Sweetheart
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Adam Sims
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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K is madly in love with his best friend, Sumire, but her devotion to a writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments. At least, that is, until she meets an older woman to whom she finds herself irresistibly drawn. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, K is solicited to join the search party—and finds himself drawn back into her world and beset by ominous visions. Subtle and haunting, Sputnik Sweetheart is a profound meditation on human longing.
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Satellites of Love
- By Darwin8u on 05-28-15
By: Haruki Murakami
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Novelist as a Vocation
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator, Ted Goossen - translator
- Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author and famously private writer Haruki Murakami shares with listeners his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians.
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Love Murakami - Struggled with this Narrator
- By Harry Bartle on 11-30-22
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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First Person Singular
- Stories
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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From the internationally acclaimed Haruki Murakami comes a mind-bending new collection of short stories, all touching beautifully on love and solitude, childhood and memory...all with a signature Murakami twist. The eight stories in this new book are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator. From memories of youth, meditations on music, and an ardent love of baseball, to dreamlike scenarios and invented jazz albums, together these stories challenge the boundaries between our minds and the exterior world.
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A Murakami novel ruined by the wrong narrator
- By Amazon Customer on 07-10-21
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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Women of Good Fortune
- By: Sophie Wan
- Narrated by: Catherine Ho
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Bride-to-be Lulu is about to marry Shanghai’s most eligible bachelor. She just has one secret: she isn't in love and is only marrying him under pressure to fix her family’s financial issues. But for Lulu and her two best friends, her upcoming nuptials may offer a different opportunity entirely…
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Such a cute story
- By L. Katz on 03-08-24
By: Sophie Wan
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After Dark
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Janet Song
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is a short, sleek novel of encounters, set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami's masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters: Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny's toward people whose lives are radically different from her own.
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Six hour short story
- By Devo on 05-21-07
By: Haruki Murakami
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After the Quake
- Stories
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Rupert Degas, Teresa Gallagher, Adam Sims
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The six stories in Haruki Murakami’s mesmerizing collection are set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, when Japan became brutally aware of the fragility of its daily existence. But the upheavals that afflict Murakami’s characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman.
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Reading is very annoying
- By Y.E. on 02-11-19
By: Haruki Murakami
outstanding, his best
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An interesting revisit of old ideas!
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A bone in the throat, but still...
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Beautifuly read and written.
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Extraordinary Writing
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A man is wearing a dress.
When asked “why?”
He answers:
"When I wear a dress, I feel like a few lines from a poem"
That man is a man created by Haruki Murakami, in his new book that I am listening to,
And I envy Haruki,
Because I was supposed to tell you that when I hug you I feel like a few lines from a poem, or even more, a whole poem,
But I only told you that after I heard Haruki.
You know that I am competitive,
So I'm trying to beat this Haruki guy before his next book comes out.
So you should know that when I hug you I feel like:
A drop of rain falling into the most beautiful flower in the garden,
Leonardo's brushstroke between the lips and cheeks of the Mona Lisa,
A grain of sand that the wind carried and dropped on the highest place on the Everest,
But I have to admit,
That it is difficult to compete with "When I wear a dress I feel like a few lines from a poem"
... A sentence that one day,
will stand on the stage in Stockholm,
and receive the Nobel Prize.
Envying Haruki
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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.
Amazing surreal storytelling
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His writing is magical
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Lyrical beauty in story wonderfully narrated
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The same but different and so much better
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