If the pandemic and its consequent confinement brought out the writer (and, of course, the baker) that everyone seemed to harbor inside, having waited to release him to find ourselves forcibly confined at home, what was Haruki doing in the meantime? Murakami (Kyoto, 1949), who, having flirted so much with the unexpected and the disconcerting, could feel that one of those fissures so dear to his imagination had opened in the sensible world?
Well, writing, obviously, as he explains to us in the epilogue of The City and Its Uncertain Walls, his fifteenth and last novel, six years after The Death of the Commander. When he started with it, in March 2020, without a doubt we all felt surrounded by uncertain walls, and perhaps that weighed, although he does not explain it to us, in his idea of rewriting from the roots a story of the same name published in 1980, in turn expanded in his novel The End of the World and a Merciless Wonderland, from 1985.
Going into the details of the plot would be ruining the party, like yelling at a girl that fairies don't exist – and also, in Murakami's case, like explaining a dream, something that only interests the person telling it – but let's say that we have a narrator marked by the loss of his great love in adolescence, a girl who told him about a walled city, with a guardian, unicorns, discarded shadows, a library and dream readers, a sort of medieval fantasy although with a disturbing counterpoint, like Michael Ende's Momo. The possibility of crossing those uncertain walls and reconnecting with that love, in what is ultimately a metaphysical adventure towards self-knowledge, will mark the existence of the protagonist.
Once again, the Japanese writer shows himself to be prodigious in the creation of spaces/atmospheres, but we are not talking so much, or not only, about a great talent for evocative description and detail, which achieves a deep sensory immersion of the reader - here the The dreamlike reading room in the walled city, the sub-basement room of the library where the ghost of the former director manifests, or the village cafeteria with its delicious blueberry muffins are places that brim with warmth and are marked by rituals of connection. with the other and with what escapes our understanding – but as material representations of our mental states, by system elusive, impenetrable, mysterious.
No element of the alleged reality in Murakami is purely physical – frame, setting, delimitation –, just as the sphere of imagination rebels against its condition of entelechy by containing many times more answers to what we really are (in this sense, The reference in the book to Gabriel García Márquez and magical realism are revealing). This game of
Vade retro because those who completely rule out the existence of unicorns, the possibility of letting go of our shadow or do not remember with bittersweet nostalgia that boy/girl who broke their heart.
