Excited fans of novelist Haruki Murakami endured the agonizing countdown to midnight on April 12 when they could satisfy their craving after six long years for his latest novel. 

About 60 people waited outside the main Shinjuku store of Kinokuniya Co., the bookstore chain, late at night until “Machi to Sono Futashikana Kabe” went on sale. 

Shinchosha Publishing Co. announced on March 1 that Murakami’s novel, which has the English title of "The City and Its Uncertain Walls," would go on sale on April 13.

It is his first novel since "Kishidancho-goroshi" (Killing Commendatore) in 2017.   

Prior to the book going on sale, Murakami conducted a joint interview with a number of media organizations, including The Asahi Shimbun, in which he explained the background to his latest novel as well as why he decided to release a new work now.

He explained that he began writing it in the spring of 2020.

“Due to the effects of the novel coronavirus, I did not leave my home very often, so there was likely a stronger tendency for me to face my inner self,” said Murakami, 74. “I felt like pulling out (a past work) from the back of a desk drawer and rewriting it."

In 1980, Murakami published a shorter work with a similar title in a monthly literary magazine. But that work was never published in book form.

The novel was written soon after Murakami published “Pinball, 1973.”

The novel would also become the basis for a huge hit that Murakami published in 1985, “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.”

That novel goes back and forth between two worlds, with one being a town surrounded by a wall. But Murakami has said in the past that he was not satisfied with how "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" turned out.

In the joint interview, Murakami explained that he wrote the original short version based mainly on his feelings because he did not have much training in writing.

“While I was able to write somewhat better when ‘End of the World’ came out compared to my debut, I believe it was still too early for me to write it,” Murakami explained. “I was very limited in what I could write and that novel took form within those narrow limits.”

The latest work is made up of three parts, with the first part also comprised of alternate chapters with the narrator at age 17 in one world and much older in the other.

The narrator is told by his girlfriend that his true self resides within the town surrounded by a high wall. She then vanishes from the narrator’s life.

The older narrator lives in a quiet town surrounded by a wall, but residents not only do not have much to say, but no one has a shadow.

The narrator is undecided about whether he should remain within the town wall or if he should go out into the larger world.

“What the wall that emerges in the novel is all about, I wrote the novel while also thinking about the wall’s meaning,” Murakami said. “We now have the novel coronavirus and the war in Ukraine, and I believe we live in a time when globalism is wavering.

"Britain left the European Union and the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons has again emerged. In such times, I believe a very important issue is choosing whether to remain sheltered within a wall or to overcome that wall in order to leave.”

When he completed the first part, Murakami felt he had finished rewriting that short novel from more than four decades ago. He did touch that version for about six months, during which time he also began to feel that the story should continue.

Murakami moved the scene of the novel to a town in Fukushima Prefecture.
The narrator, now in his 40s, meets with people who have assorted psychological scars and difficulty adjusting to society. Such characters are prevalent in many of Murakami’s past works.

The narrator again comes face to face with the town of the first part.

“The second and third parts become a much deeper story with wider ramifications because it is unclear which is the shadow and which is the real thing,” Murakami said. “It was very difficult to write and I had to rewrite those parts a number of times.”

In addition to walls, shadows are also a prevalent motif in Murakami’s works. The novel proceeds with a quiet and thoughtful attempt to delve further into the significance of shadows.

“To me, shadows are like the ego in my subconscious,” Murakami said. “For me, writing long novels is like digging into a consciousness that has been removed from consciousness. I wrote about shadows in this novel because I wanted to turn the work of writing a novel itself into a novel.”

Murakami has legions of loyal fans around the world because his past works have been translated into about 50 languages.

“In Russia, several of my books have become best-sellers and six translations have also appeared in Ukraine,” he said. “I believe readers of my books do not welcome war at all. I hope such people will carefully read my work.”