Haruki Murakami:とその不確かな (The City and Its Uncertain Walls)

The latest addition to my website isHaruki Murakami‘s とその不確かな (The City and Its Uncertain Walls). Our unnamed seventeen year old loner hero meets a sixteen year loner girl. She insists that she is just a shadow and her real self is in a strange city which she describes. Late she will disappear and he reluctantly gets on with his life. Only when he is forty-five does he suddenly find himself in the city where she is the librarian though this real self does not recognise him. He has been separated from his shadow which wants to escape back to the real world but he himself suddenly finds himself back in the real world. To escape the rat race he takes a job of head librarian in a small remote town. There he meets his predecessor, long dead, and a teenage boy who seems to know about the city with the uncertain walls and wants his help to get there. This is a rewrite of a novella he published in a magazine before he was famous which moves away from magic realism and is closer to whimsical fantasy. It did not really work for me but others may enjoy it.

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