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 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

Highly rated for:

Unique Storytelling Style Surreal Narrative Elements Interconnected Story Threads Thought-provoking Concepts
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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