Haruki Murakami has a new novel out. He gave an interview about it last month when it was released.
It’s hard to explain what The City and its Uncertain Walls is about. It opens with a guy whose job it is to read dreams. Those dreams are stored on shelves of a library. And that library exists in a town that is surrounded by a wall, with a Gatekeeper watching the one entry point. Oh, and each person has a shadow — one that can live independently from its…host? Source? Person?
It’s Haruki Murakami’s first novel in six years. And it’s actually a re-visiting of a novella he wrote in 1980. In an interview conducted through a translator via email, he talked about his inspirations behind the new book, how he feels about getting older and his unyielding love for The Great Gatsby.
The City and its Uncertain Walls has its origins in a short story you wrote and published in 1980. The novel is also connected to a previous book you wrote, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. How do you feel when you’re revisiting work you wrote decades ago?
The 1980 novella I wrote, “The City, and Its Uncertain Walls” is the only work of mine I haven’t allowed to be reprinted. It appeared in a magazine, but I didn’t let it be published in book format. The reason is that when it was published in the magazine, I felt it was still raw and immature. The theme I explored in that story was a very important one for me, and what I wrote about was, you might say, an inception point for me as a novelist. The problem was I lacked the requisite writing skills at the time to convey the story the way I thought I should. So I had decided that I would go back to it and do a complete rewrite once I had acquired the necessary experience and writing expertise.
In the meantime, however, other projects came up that I wanted to tackle, and some 40 years passed by (in the flash, it seemed) without me getting back to work on that story. By then I was in my 70s, and I thought maybe I don’t have all that much time remaining. So it’s a great relief to manage to finish writing this novel now, from a fresh perspective. I feel like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders.
I will, of course, be writing a review of it once I finish it. I was very pleased to find a hardcover edition under the tree this morning.