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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The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.
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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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- Original Recording
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It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.
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A Revelation!
- By wotsallthisthen on 04-07-24
By: George Orwell, and others
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The Art of War
- By: Sun Tzu
- Narrated by: Aidan Gillen
- Length: 1 hr and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The 13 chapters of The Art of War, each devoted to one aspect of warfare, were compiled by the high-ranking Chinese military general, strategist, and philosopher Sun-Tzu. In spite of its battlefield specificity, The Art of War has found new life in the modern age, with leaders in fields as wide and far-reaching as world politics, human psychology, and corporate strategy finding valuable insight in its timeworn words.
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The actual book The Art of War, not a commentary
- By Nemo71 on 12-31-19
By: Sun Tzu
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Dead Med
- By: Freida McFadden
- Narrated by: Patricia Santomasso, Scott Merriman
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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When Heather McKinley dreamed of becoming a doctor, she imagined curing sick kids and sporting pink stethoscopes. She never anticipated the sleepless nights, grueling exams, and endless labs. And she certainly never knew that her medical school earned the nickname Dead Med thanks to the tragic history of students overdosing on illegal drugs. But Heather would never consider doing anything like that. That is, until her longtime boyfriend dumps her, she finds herself failing anatomy, and her world starts to crumble.
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Hmm
- By Morgan Meaux on 08-22-24
By: Freida McFadden
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With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.
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dull
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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
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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
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South of the Border, West of the Sun
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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
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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage
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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
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Sputnik Sweetheart
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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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First Person Singular
- Stories
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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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Men Without Women
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Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are lovesick doctors, students, ex-boyfriends, actors, bartenders, and even Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, brought together to tell stories that speak to us all. In Men Without Women, Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic, marked by the same wry humor and pathos that have defined his entire body of work.
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That's how we become Men Without Women
- By Darwin8u on 07-27-17
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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The Teller of Small Fortunes
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Tao is an immigrant fortune teller, traveling between villages with just her trusty mule for company. She only tells "small" fortunes: whether it will hail next week; which boy the barmaid will kiss; when the cow will calve. She knows from bitter experience that big fortunes come with big consequences… Even if it’s a lonely life, it’s better than the one she left behind. But a small fortune unexpectedly becomes something more when a (semi) reformed thief and an ex-mercenary recruit her into their desperate search for a lost child.
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What a great story!
- By Matt on 11-23-24
By: Julie Leong
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Novelist as a Vocation
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator, Ted Goossen - translator
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- 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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Underground
- The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin, Ian Anthony Dale, Janet Song
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- Unabridged
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On a clear spring day in 1995, five members of a religious cult unleashed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system. In attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakmi talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe, and in so doing lays bare the Japanese psyche. As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere.
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Just as you breathe, you dream your story
- By Darwin8u on 08-26-15
By: Haruki Murakami
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Murakami T
- The T-Shirts I Love
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe
- Length: 1 hr and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Considered "the world's most popular cult novelist" (The Guardian), Haruki Murakami has written books that have galvanized millions around the world. Many of his fans know about his 10,000-vinyl-record collection, and his obsession with running, but few have heard about a more intimate, and perhaps more unique, passion: his T-shirt-collecting habit.
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
What listeners say about The City and Its Uncertain Walls
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- Dakini
- 11-26-24
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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- MiniMello
- 12-10-24
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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- Arin
- 12-05-24
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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- Tbaley
- 12-27-24
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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- Amazon Customer
- 01-01-25
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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- Phyllis Akif
- 11-30-24
An Unparalled Storyteller
I have never read a novel by Haruki Murakami that I didn’t love. He creates worlds that envelope the reader so masterfully. Just as I love and admire Japanese visual artists, so, too, do I admire Murakami as artis
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- # 1 Listener
- 12-07-24
Another great story
Another great story by Mr. Murakami, takes the reader on a mental trip and candy for the senses.
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- rae
- 12-19-24
Revering books
I chose to listen to this because I had previously enjoyed other Murakami novels, but this was a real disappointment! The voice of the narrator compensated for the lameness of the story and endless repetition. If I had been reading rather than listening to it, I would have put it down long before the middle.
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- Anonymous User
- 12-27-24
One of my new favourites from Haruki Murakami
The storyline is amazing, always keeps your curiosity up, amazing how he wrote one part of the story at the age of 31 and then how he continued 40 years later.
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- **Patrycja**
- 12-12-24
Introspective, straightforward, neat, and magical
I enjoyed the meandering plot of this story, traveling between different realities of self and the world around, slowly merging into a singular narrative.
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