Haruki Murakamis neuer Roman | EUROtoday

ZTwo Japanese youngsters meet at a writing competitors awards ceremony the place they each obtain awards for his or her tales. The boy is seventeen, the lady a yr youthful. They change addresses, write letters to one another and finally meet often for lengthy walks by means of Tokyo. There is kissing, however nothing extra, though the boy longs for it. The lady additionally tells him that she needs to “belong to you completely” and “be one with you,” however she doesn’t really feel prepared for that but as a result of “my mind and my body are separate. They are in different places.” This goes up to now that she generally feels “like someone’s shadow” whereas her “real self is somewhere else”.

This outlines a theme that characterizes Haruki Murakami’s new novel “The City and its Uncertain Wall” on each web page. Where the girlfriend’s “real self” is, asks the seventeen-year-old, who stays anonymous all through the novel, like her and quite a few different characters. The lady talks a couple of metropolis behind a brick wall, someplace on the finish of the world, the place there isn’t a gasoline or electrical energy. There is a guard on the gate who lets a herd of unicorns into the town to graze each morning and out once more within the night. A river spanned by three bridges divides the town in half. In the middle is a clock tower with out arms and never removed from it’s a library the place her actual self works as a librarian. By the best way, nobody within the metropolis has a shadow, and anybody who enters it as a stranger should give their shadow to the watchman. There is not any method out once more.

All of this ought to be no stranger to Murakami’s readers. Basically, it’s the third try that the creator has made to discover the town by means of literature. Even earlier than he retired from the jazz membership he based to solely write, he printed a hundred-page story about one such metropolis. A bit later, within the novel “Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” from 1985, the development could be very related; the ebook even features a map of the town that appears similar to the outline within the novel, which is nearly forty years youthful. The escape that the hero undertakes on the finish to save lots of his withering shadow and the ultimate choice to remain whereas the shadow escapes to the land past the wall is comparable in each texts. Murakami explains this in his afterword: He was not solely glad with the options he had discovered for the topic of the walled complementary metropolis, so he set about telling the story once more throughout the Corona interval.

The chaste lady from the espresso store

The result’s a glowing, superiorly composed novel that’s poorer in arabesques and richer in spectacular pictures than the sooner work. It begins with the story of the town’s origins, which is attributed right here to the conversations between the younger lovers – the lady tells the story, the boy writes down each element in a pocket book, asks questions if one thing is unclear to him, and contributes together with his personal contributions. The love story, which quickly involves an abrupt finish as a result of the lady merely disappears, is interrupted by descriptions of the older lover’s keep, who really involves the town and meets the girlfriend’s “real self” there – she will not be there for a day aged, is aware of nothing about him or their shared previous, however helps him in his job of studying and deciphering the egg-shaped materialized goals of former residents within the metropolis’s library.