One Story to Tell
On longevity, magic, & realism
Good morning, readers.
Last week I had the luxury of two snow days and spent them trudging through Baltimore in my snow boots, drinking hot chocolate, and reading Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, translated by Philip Gabriel.
There’s something about Murakami novels I find comforting1: the sentences, the characters and the dialogue are extremely even-handed, almost placid. Details are precise, tangible, and commonplace: the spaghetti is boiled, the album is turned over, shoes crunch in the snow. Motifs repeat. Action is methodical and un-rushed even when (or especially when) something odd or other-wordly happens. When things frequently are strange— alternate dimensions, talking cats, disappearing people— the characters rarely, if ever, respond with panic or anxiety. The strangeness is fully acknowledged, even sometimes with fright, but there’s always a sense of determined or orderly pragmatism I find very soothing. (Come to think of it, this is probably why I love Dale Cooper so much.)
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is not only of a piece with the rest of Murakami’s bibliography but maybe its ideal, a concentration of his body of work up to this point. I don’t meant that it’s the best, exactly (it’s not), but both that it follows some of his favorite beats— middle-aged man having a crisis, secret otherworld, young lost love, cats— and that it’s a literal return to form, a third crack at a story he’s been trying to tell for more than 40 years: first as a short story, then novel attempt #1 Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in 1985, and now this, in 2024.
In a 1994 interview with John Wesley Harding for BOMB, Murakami describes the feeling of still being dissatisfied with round two (almost ten years after the initial publication of Wonderland and thirty (!) before The City):
When I published my first book, Hear the Wind Sing, I wrote a very small piece in the story about a world, a town, surrounded by a high wall… And I knew that it wasn't well written so I just gave up. But I felt there was something very important embedded in that story. After five or six years I expanded it into Hardboiled Wonderland. But even then, I felt it was not enough.2
In 2024, in the afterword to The City, he continues:
I published [Wonderland] as a book in 1985. I was thirty-six then. A period when all sorts of things forged ahead on their own.
As the years passed by, though, and as I gained more experience as a writer and grew older, I couldn't help but think that I hadn't seen this unfinished, or perhaps immature, work through to its conclusion. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was one response to the original story, but I thought a different form of response might be worth doing, too. Not overwriting the earlier work but instead creating a story that coexisted with it, so that the two complemented each other. It was exactly forty years since I'd published it. In the interim I'd gone from age thirty-one to seventy-one. In many ways there's a major difference between a novice writer holding down two jobs and an experienced professional writer (though I find it embarrassing to say so). But when it comes to the natural affection one has for the act of writing novels there shouldn't be much of a difference……
Honestly, I feel relieved. For so long this work had felt like a small fish bone caught in my throat, something that bothered me.
For me—both as a writer and as a person—this little bone was very significant. Rewriting the work for the first time in some forty years, and stopping by that town again, made me acutely aware of this.
As Jorge Luis Borges put it, there are basically a limited number of stories one writer can seriously relate in his lifetime. All we do— I think it's fair to say—is take that limited palette of motifs, change the approach and methods as we go, and rewrite them in all sorts of ways.
Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change and movement. Isn't this the quintessential core of what stories are all about? At least that's how I see it.3
I find his stubbornness delightful, how he doesn’t let what he perceives as his failures or inadequacies prevent him from trying again (and again), instead of my usual method which is to throw a tantrum and quit forever if I am not very good at something on the first try.
One of Murakami’s motifs is the surreal and the dream world, a kind of magical realism. At this point, I do not read a Murakami book to be surprised by his style or form, let alone in a novel I’ve read an earlier version of, and yet in The City and Its Uncertain Walls there was one element that did get me: late in the novel, the book Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez is quoted directly and then reflected on by the narrator and his girlfriend.
There are books and libraries all over Murakami’s fiction (another reason I enjoy it), though secondary in frequency and importance to music. There are literary allusions, too— Kafka on the Shore essentially as a whole comes to mind first as the most obvious one, among many more. What I don’t remember is ever seeing such a distinct, lengthy passage quoted directly in the narrative, let alone paired with a reference to the author, or analyzed in terms of genre.
In the story, the narrator’s girlfriend reads him a passage from Love in The Time of Cholera where Fermina Daza sees the ghost of the drowned woman, and comments to the narrator:
“In his stories the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one,” she said. “Like that’s an entirely ordinary, everyday thing.”
“People often call that magical realism,” I said.
“True. But I think that although that way of telling stories might fit the critical criteria of magical realism, for García Márquez himself it’s just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes those scenes the way he sees them.”
…Talking about García Márquez’s novels made me think of Mr. Koyatsu. If she had met him, I think she might have simply accepted the fact that he was already dead. Unconnected with magical realism or postmodernism or anything.4
A few pages later, the narrator is reflecting on the conversation and his friend Mr. Koyatsu. The book repeats part of the Love in the Time of Cholera passage for a second time, and continues:
García Márquez, a Colombian novelist who had no need of the distinction between the living and the dead. What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal? I think there might be. No, not might— there is one.5
Murakami has likely been asked about magical realism possibly countless times throughout his career; it’s the subject of dozens of articles and essays (in English alone). He’s sometimes resistant to the describer, much as his character cites García Márquez as being, but contradicts himself:
In the BOMB interview mentioned from 1994:
JWH: In your novels so many magical things happen. But it's not like the "magical realism" of South American writing. It's a different kind of magic: characters walking through walls and characters who are but aren't.
HM: Many American novels and stories are very "realistic" and well organized. I started to write novels and stories when I was thirty years old. Before that I didn't write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn't create anything at all. But all of a sudden I started to write my own things and I think that is a kind of magic. I can do anything when I'm creating stories. I can make any miracle. That's a great thing for me. I can say I deal in magic…. I see many people who disguise themselves. I know some people who say, "I'm an artist, I'm very creative, I'm different from ordinary people." But I don't believe those people. I like to see the strangeness or weirdness in ordinary people or ordinary scenery or ordinary, everyday life….. I think of myself as a very normal person. At the same time, I'm a very abnormal person. But I can't tell the difference.6 7
in 2004, in The Paris Review:
My style, what I think of as my style, is very close to Hard-Boiled Wonderland. I don’t like the realistic style, myself. I prefer a more surrealistic style. . . . Well, I think it’s my honest observation of how strange the world is. My protagonists are experiencing what I experience as I write, which is also what the readers experience as they read. Kafka or García Márquez, what they are writing is more literature, in the classical sense. My stories are more actual, more contemporary, more the postmodern experience. Think of it like a movie set, where everything—all the props, the books on the wall, the shelves—is fake. The walls are made of paper. In the classical kind of magic realism, the walls and the books are real. If something is fake in my fiction, I like to say it’s fake. I don’t want to act as if it’s real.8
And finally in 2024, in an interview with NPR on the release of The City, he says:
You write beautifully about loneliness, longing and love in this novel. What can surrealist, magical fiction say about these themes that realistic fiction can't?
I've never thought of my writing style as surrealistic, or as magical realism. I simply write the stories that I want to write, and in a style that suits me.9
As funny as it may be to nitpick his phrasing (I prefer vs. I never, etc) I don’t think how he labels his own style is very important, nor do I think the substance of what he’s saying is that distinct; as he says in the last quote, he writes what he wants to write, and the labels that readers ascribe to one book or the other don’t interest him very much, because to him they’re all of a kind. Because of that, I think it is interesting is how in The City, Murakami chose to engage with the genre directly in the text of his work for the first time, in a way that not just quotes from another work of fiction but offers commentary on it, including the premise that for García Márquez it is just “ordinary fiction,10” in similar language to what Murakami has used to described himself, in a manner atypical from Murakami’s usual style.
Why now? It could just be that it is what served the narrative best: The City is a novel about reading, libraries, and about reality (and often about ghosts); it makes fine narrative sense that two characters would discuss a specific book, and consider how the book is similar to their own lives. Maybe it was just fun to write, as a prolific reader himself. Maybe, as he said in the afterword (quoted above), it was time to “change the approach and methods as we go,” he needed to find a new device or tool to tell his “limited number of stories.” I’m curious, however, if it felt more right for Murakami consider the place of this book in his career, the fact that it’s a second revisiting of a story that has spanned a long career, a book that will (god willing) not be his last but will presumably be among the last; if the place of his work in the canon of Japanese literature and/or magical realism literature as a whole has become something more immediate in his mind as he works. Maybe this is a lazy point of comparison but I’m reminded of last year’s film The Boy and the Heron from Hayao Miyazaki, another Japanese artist of Murakami’s generation who has grappled with a few set themes over the course of his career, a piece made with the understanding (to some degree) that this one may be his last.
I’m not looking for an answer, partly because I doubt there is a neat explanation, mainly because authorial intent is not usually something I generally care about except from a craft perspective. Questions of what to include or not to include in a novel, particularly a “genre” book that maybe knows it’s a genre book, and the potential “why’s” are fun to consider.
If you’ve read it, let me know your thoughts! And if you hate Murakami and want to talk about Breasts and Eggs instead, I support you and my inbox is open.
Til next time,
Court
A few things I’ve been reading & watching lately:
We watched Nosferatu (pretty bad, good costumes, felt like a too-credulous adaptation of the source material) and Nickel Boys (excellent, well-adapted, amazing performances; I am curious how it played with people who haven’t read the book).
The Woman Who Borrowed Memories, by Tove Jansson. Absolutely fantastic. (Everything I’ve read by Tove is.)
I love collecting books and beautiful editions of books, but something about this article on the new special edition/books as collectibles (NYT, gift link) made me feel uncomfortable, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’m being pretentious about the genre or if it’s the BookTok consumerism/ performative hoarding. (It doesn’t come up in the article but the arguments for it— fan satisfaction AND a bestseller boost with plenty of $$— is basically why Tayl*r Sw*ft keeps releasing new “editions” of the same album, no?)
After realizing there was an enormous appetite for special editions, Entangled has started giving the deluxe, sprayed-edge treatment to most of its books, Pelletier said.
“Now, to not spray-paint the edges would send the wrong kind of signal, that a book is not worth collecting,” she said.
“Now It’s Nothing But Flowers,” by Anna Vangala Jones, in Rejection Letters
Will Tavlin, in n+1, on Netflix (which has been on my nemesis list since they bought May December and which has only continued to piss me off11):
“Play Something,” as in: play anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, if a user is on their phone or cleaning their room. What matters is that it’s on, and that it stays on until Netflix asks its perennial question, a prompt that appears when the platform thinks a user has fallen asleep: “Are you still watching?”
Always a good list: books by women of color to look forward to in 2025, edited by R.O. Kwon
A fun history of the (now-defunct) Lancaster Crematorium, a small building I’ve walked by a number of times but didn’t know was so important to the history of cremation in general, as the first public crematorium in the US. By Bodie Cambert, in Contingent Magazine.
Maral Attar-Zadeh in LA Review of Books, on Luca Guadigno’s Queer and “disembodiment.”
I liked this, from Lyta Gold, on The Odyssey (with a bonus Larry Hogan roast).
I think people who care about literature need to make this argument, relentlessly: that everybody deserves to have access to these stories, that they’re cool and good and fun, that not everything in the world needs to help advance you up the ladder, that there’s more to being alive than work and posting and gaining influence, that winning isn’t in fact everything.
Last but not least: I’m not going to link the NYMag Gaiman article by Lila Shapiro here, because it’s easy enough to find without it & if you haven’t yet I suggest being cautious and checking in with yourself before opening it. But I did read it, am horrified & maybe grieving a little, and I am grateful to Scarlett and the others for telling their story.
I am a Murakami enjoyer, but not exactly a Murakami defender. I agree with essentially every broad criticism I’ve seen of his work: he sticks to extremely similar characters & plot devices, he’s not great at writing women, he’s obsessed with breasts, etc. None of that is wrong, but for whatever reason it doesn’t bother me in his specific context and I don’t know why. The pleasure of the language outweighs the other concerns? He has like twenty books and is like 75, so I’m used to it? Not sure, but that’s how it is.
Murakami, Haruki. The City and Its Uncertain Walls, p. 448-449
Ibid, p. 351
Ibid, p. 355
Not 100% relevant to my point so sticking this in the footnotes but I love the part in the article where Harding asks Murakami about David Lynch and he replies: “I admire [David Lynch] very much… We are crazy about Twin Peaks in Japan. Do you remember the room with red curtains and the dancing dwarf? That's the room I mean when I think about subconsciousness. There is something strange and special in yourself. David Lynch knows that too and so we can both create those images, the same images.”
I obviously want people to give Todd Haynes money to make movies; production studios should be begging Todd Haynes to take their money. But buying up an actual film just to treat it as content, to put it in just enough theaters to qualify for awards but not enough to let people actually see and then refuse to allow a physical release so you “own” it forever/until your servers catch a cold and it becomes lost media is shitty, anti-art behavior along with all the rest.