The City and Its Uncertain Walls

“A ‘cosy’ masterpiece with agony between its lines… [The City and Its Uncertain Walls is] quietly miraculous… The greatest books…are those which enable us to enter their worlds, just as Murakami’s narrator enters his mysterious libraries.” ― Telegraph

“No other author mixes domestic, fantastic and esoteric elements into such weirdly bewitching shades.” ― Financial Times

“Regular readers will delight in the Easter eggs nested in an unsettling quest spun from Murakami’s long-patented dream logic.” ― Observer, Best Novels Autumn 2024

“An enveloping magical realist story.” ― i

“A mysterious, magical book that reveals itself like a secret being said. Murakami offers a beguiling look at self and the lengths we go to for love.” ― Hanako Footman, author of Mongrel

“[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.” ― Washington Post

“Murakami blends the whimsical and the threatening with the skill of that other pre-eminent Japanese visionary, Hayao Miyazaki.” ― A.K. Blakemore, Guardian

“Spellbinding…oddly irresistible.” ― Wall Street Journal

“A sublime meditation on time, age and love.” ― Woman and Home

“One of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling.” ― Boston Globe

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon.

In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami’s distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

Philip Gabriel is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature and Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature and has translated many novels and short stories by the writer Haruki Murakami and other modern writers. He is recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature (2001) for his translation of Senji Kuroi’s Life in the Cul-de-Sac, and the 2006 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.