The City and Its Uncertain Walls By Murakami Book Review

The City and Its Uncertain Walls By Murakami Book Review

Review By Harsimran Kaur | Rating: 4/5

The Shadow lurks behind me. I often don’t manage to see it as it is awkward to look back all the time. But, it is relentless in its pursuit to tag along. Why is it there? I don’t know! I could have managed without the shadow; if it really serves any purpose? It is not anthropomorphic; just an overcast illusion causing a pastiche of conflict. The appellation of ‘shadow’ is rather forbidding, maybe I am the grotesque simulacrum of the Spartan silhouette traveling along. Has the ‘shadow’ ever felt as an inalienable fief? Or it is just me under the control of things and the ‘shadow’ becomes a contemporaneous heuristic watch guard? 

Can a day arrive where the ‘paradoxical shadow’ becomes impassable?

As ill-advised it may sound, one could just dehisce it off as a low-lying parietal silhouette and play with it as an object d’ art. Or given a choice, it could just be swallowed by thin air and then appear as a shimmering apparition. So, have we every discerned the difference between ‘real’ vs. ‘shadow’?

In exuberance, the boundary between them is a caboodle without a gaff. It’s an intrinsic journey of conscious living, hefty and prodigious in the mind, also awakening the power of the acquiescent shadow to be relevant in the evanescence of life. All this sounds mystic, isn’t it? A presumptuous fantasy, yet real in its occupation to stretch the thread of life; a life that is posthumously grieved on; the body and the shadow separated forever to meet once again in its spirit realm.  

So, here is the story within the uncertain walls where the shadow is separated from the protagonist when he reaches an almost eldritch town. The wall- so tall and resolute is unyielding, insidiously changing reflexes thereby becoming an impregnable sophistry. Once inside the wall to find his mysterious girlfriend, the young man is hired as a ‘dream reader’ in an eerie library. His eyes are wounded so that he can read dreams from the egg-litarian economy residing in the shelves. The world to him is of no consequence till he realizes his shadow is in danger and will supposedly die.

In the town of squandering unicorns and their buried feast of flames, the young man is taken off-guard by the gatekeeper of the ‘wall’ presiding on unconventional rules. The pace of the town is andante, the time forever eclipsed in the fragility of reclusive emotions where the body and mind live on the propinquity to be just ‘alive’.

Is he able to rescue his ‘shadow’ and transport it to the other world—‘the real world’?

Will the ‘shadow’ survive without him or the ‘treaty of consciousness will keep them aligned?

The young man is not so young now! He sits as the head-librarian in the town of Z**. What is to be seen now is if he was transported back along with its shadow that still pulsates upon him as a febrile impulse? The town, so real with real people is Spartan but gradually postulates an opulent spark of mysteries and esoteric truths. A precocious child probably becomes the ‘conscious efflorescence’ for the protagonist who is now in his mid-forties. Ghostly conversations, reflecting on the unfinished confluence of past profligacies and an incumbent need, at a conscious level, to not disintegrate the decisive patterns created together by the ‘shadow’ and the ‘real’ finally absorbs the prescriptive, leaving the proscriptive behind.

At times, there is this sense of revulsion to the mere existence; is conscious so attune with our sensibilities that a sense of ‘shadowy trail’ also becomes our conscious.

Is the young man ‘real’ or ‘shadow’? His long conversations with Tatsuya Koyasu, the preceding Head Librarian, makes it clear that memories are a sub-set of our conscious that ricochets in bits & pieces, and perceptibly without our conscious,  we are all paint flaking off the patches.

‘The City and its Uncertain Walls’ by Murakami is a vivid phantasmagoria of making connections to realize the inner depth of our lives purpose. What makes us complete is our conscious aligned with cleaning of the past papilloma, defeating the self-piteous surrounding the pyrrhic present and off-loading future extrapolations.

The story is beautiful, however, unnecessarily stretched. At one point, it makes you believe in the inevitable and on the contrary, leaves you unsettled of an illusionary world that is devoid of belonging.

The Young man who gradually surpasses his age, in search of his missing girlfriend, has to travel to a fictitious town and is then loaded back to the real world. One is rendered to ask if the conscious momentarily leaves us when we find ourselves disillusioned. What does it take to live consciously? Is it the fractured sub-conscious? In fact, it’s the healing of past traumas and opening up the present faculties that retracts us back to our shadow.

TAKE AWAY

Murakami is an illusionist, creating MAGIC!

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