The story

At seventeen, the narrator falls in love with a girl who tells him a strange thing: that the person he knows is only a stand-in, and that her real self lives in a far-off town surrounded by a high, shifting wall. Together, in long conversations, they build that town between them, and then one day she simply vanishes. The rest of the novel follows him across the years that grow around that absence: into the walled town itself, where he must leave his shadow at the gate, and where he spends his evenings reading old dreams in a library, beside a girl who does not remember him; and back in this world, into middle age, where he quits his Tokyo job to run a small library in a mountain town, and meets an old librarian in a beret and a skirt who turns out to be rather more than he seems, and a silent boy in a Yellow Submarine parka who knows about the walled town without ever having been told.

A love story that isn’t one

What I most want to say about this book is that it wears the clothes of a love story, and it is not one. What it really tells is the slow liberation of a man from the belief that he would never again find anything like the love he lost at seventeen. That is the whole journey, and it takes him decades.

Murakami roots it in first love on purpose, I think. It can happen at any age, but that teenage love is the one so many of us mythologise, probably because it is the first, and so it feels like the most intense thing that will ever happen to us. The book’s argument is that we cannot hold on to that love eternally, because there is far more left to live, far more people still to meet, and love can arrive again from anywhere at all, even somewhere as unremarkable as a small coffee shop in a mountain town.

The book knows how absurd the spell is, too, and lets one wink of humour through. When the woman from that very coffee shop asks about the girl from his past - but she must have been a wonderful person, right? - he answers: Was she? Who was it who said loving someone is like having a mental illness that’s not covered by health insurance? She laughs quietly. So did I.

The town within the walls

I will be honest: at first the town felt strange to me, and I could not tell what half of it was for. Slowly I realised it was not supposed to all make sense. The town is something our minds build out of our own experiences and thoughts, and you read it the way you would walk through someone’s memory, accepting what you find there.

What I ended up feeling is that the town is a refuge that turns into a prison if you stay. Inside the walls you are calm. There is a routine, a purpose, nothing to worry about, and the noise of the world cannot reach you. But it is the calm of a sealed room, and if you keep living in there, tending an old memory while your self out in the real world goes unwatched, it becomes genuinely dangerous. The wall does not hold you in; your own comfort does. Where Kafka on the Shore let the magic pour into the real world, this book does the opposite: it builds a sealed world you can retreat into, and then asks, very gently, when you are planning to come back out.

Mr Koyasu, a ghost who teaches you to live

The heart of the middle of the book, and my favourite presence in it, is Mr Koyasu, the old librarian with the beret and the skirt. He has lived through everything the narrator is feeling and far worse, having lost his little son and then his wife in the cruellest of ways, and he has come out the other side of that grief as a man who simply cannot bear to watch other people suffer. You see it in everything he does: the way he looks after Mrs Soeda, the children, the library he built as a warm room in a cold town. And so, without ever announcing it, he takes on the quiet work of guiding the narrator’s spirit through the same passage he once made himself.

There is an exchange between them that I have not stopped thinking about. The narrator confesses that he sometimes feels he has lost sight of himself, that he is merely a shadow, that he is simply tracing an outline of myself, cleverly pretending to be me. And Koyasu answers that the real self and the shadow are essentially two sides of the same coin, that depending on the circumstances they can change roles, and that this is precisely how people overcome troubles and survive. It’s nothing to be concerned about, he says. Because the person here right now is indeed you.

That is the book in miniature. The narrator of the walled town, still holding the girl, and the narrator of the real world, slowly moving ahead, have been trading places all along, depending on what he needed to survive. And it does not matter which one is “real”. Both are him. We all carry those two selves, the one that still thinks about a certain person, and the one that has accepted the parting and keeps walking, and we survive by letting them take turns.

Even the way Koyasu leaves is a lesson: he fades, little by little, exactly as the people around him learn to live without him. That is what a good goodbye looks like.

The boy in the Yellow Submarine parka

And then there is the boy, the strangest piece of the puzzle, and the one I am still turning over. He reads every book in the library and forgets nothing, speaks to almost no one, and has no place in the ordinary world that fits the shape of him. And somehow he knows the walled town, and knows its map without anyone ever having shown him one.

The reading I have settled on is that he is the narrator’s exact inverse. The narrator went to the town chasing a memory, and his task was to learn to leave. The boy belongs there, and his task was to find a way in. For him the roles are reversed: it is this world that is the shadow-life, and the town that holds his real self. He cannot reach it alone, because the town exists inside minds, so he reaches it through the narrator, and in taking over the reading of dreams he does the narrator a final kindness: he takes custody of the part of him that wanted to stay, the part still holding the girl, so that the rest of him can go home whole.

Koyasu had already told him as much, long before the town gave him the proof:

Instead of wondering which is real and which is the shadow, it might be best to think how each is the vital other self to the other.

The proof is the boy taking his seat at the dream-reading desk, and it releases him. There is one eerie loose thread: in one of the conversations they have down there, the boy mentions that his body might be lying in a cabin somewhere in the forest, and that it does not matter any more. It unsettled me, and I think it is meant to. It is the one moment Murakami lets the cost of full passage show: to go somewhere entirely, something must be left behind. He never resolves it, and he is right not to, because any answer would break the spell.

On the pace of it

I will not pretend the book moves quickly. The first part felt slow to me, though in fairness I was reading it in stolen moments, without the calm it asks for. Kafka on the Shore is the better-paced novel, and of the Murakami I have read, it still holds the crown. But the slowness here is at least partly the point: this is a book about convalescence, and convalescence does not hurry.

There is also something moving in where it came from. Murakami first wrote this story as a novella in 1980, was never satisfied with it, refused to let it be reprinted, and carried it like a fishbone in his throat for forty years before rewriting it as this novel. Which means the book does exactly what it preaches: he went back to an old, unfinished thing that had been waiting inside him for decades, not to live in it again, but to finally set it down.

Final thoughts

The ending is peaceful, and it tells you almost nothing about what happens next, which is exactly right. We do not need the details, because we already know the only thing that matters: the narrator has changed, is more present in his own life, and has learned to live without her, with room, probably, for a new love. After several hundred pages of walls and shadows, that calm certainty is enough.

I would recommend it to anyone fond of Murakami, though not as an introduction; start with Kafka on the Shore and come to this one later, when the slowness will read as intended. But it is really a book for whoever is going through what the narrator goes through: learning to let go of the memory of someone from the past. This book will not hurry you, and it will not lie to you about how long it takes. It will simply keep you company inside the walls, and then, when you are ready, quietly show you the gate.