The City That Could Not Stay Still
How Haruki Murakami passes his old walled world to another reader
Spoiler warning: This essay discusses the full novel, including the boy's disappearance and the final pages.
The first library in The City and Its Uncertain Walls retains almost everything required to look like a library: shelves, a ledger, lamps, keys, a stove, an attendant. It has no books—“not a single volume,” Haruki Murakami writes. Old dreams occupy the shelves instead, each sealed in a hard, egg-shaped shell and powdered with dust. Only one appointed man may read them. He is called the Dream Reader, although he can barely make out what the dreams are saying.
That preservation without exchange also shapes his lost love. The teenage girl who once described the City now works as the library attendant, choosing dreams and recording his progress, but she has no memory of him. Her recognizable form survives while the shared past has been removed. Outside the wall, she and the narrator had imagined the City together.
After she disappeared, he continued alone, adding details and color to their unfinished invention until a dialogue became a private archive.
That could explain why Murakami needed the novel's long second and third parts. Their movement is larger than the narrator's recovery from adolescent grief. They change who can read, describe, and revise the City. The first library reserves its sealed contents for a solitary reader; the second circulates books among strangers.
From that ordinary circulation comes a boy who hears the narrator's story, draws its map, accepts corrections, and ultimately expects the wall to accommodate him. Murakami's old enclosure begins to move when its maker loses exclusive authority over it.
A Library Built for One Reader
Part One constructs the City by subtraction. Residents surrender their shadows. The clock tower loses its hands. Books disappear from the library, leaving objects that preserve voices without making those voices readily intelligible. The Dream Reader warms each shell, releases the murmur inside, and lets it fade. The girl selects the next dream and enters the completed work in a ledger. Their duties meet across a desk, but the relation cannot develop: she cannot remember him, and he cannot properly interpret what he reads.
Even the narration encloses her. Much of Part One addresses the girl as “you,” keeping an absent person grammatically present through sustained second-person address.
Every building, ritual, and memory is delivered to someone who cannot answer. The address produces aching intimacy while trapping the prose in a single unanswered relation, and the narrator has made one consciousness the destination of an entire world.
The old dreams deepen that design. Shelled, shelved, and assigned to a prescribed reader, they cannot pass freely from hand to hand. Reading releases them from storage without producing a new interpretation. The narrator eventually admits that he has never grasped more than fragments of their contents; his office carries authority without mastery. Like his preserved image of the girl, it lets him tend an absence while remaining answerable to nobody outside it.
What Ordinary Lending Changes
The library in the mountain town repeats the old arrangement in altered materials. There is another stove, another basement room, another attendant with keys, and a succession of solitary custodians shaped by loss. Here, however, the shelves hold books. Patrons choose among them. Handwritten lending cards record those choices; damaged volumes are repaired, outdated ones removed, and new titles purchased from a limited budget. The prose dwells on this work with a plain administrative patience that can feel almost aggressively uneventful.
Such tedium disciplines the narrator. By studying borrowing records, he confronts tastes he did not select and a town that, as he concedes, operates apart from his hopes. Directorship now requires attention to other readers. He may even reorganize the collection, but he cannot determine what the patrons will want from it.
The difference between the two libraries lies less in atmosphere than in social practice: one assigns a single interpreter; the other survives through repeated acts of lending, return, maintenance, and choice.
And here is the counterpoint, the key, used by Murakami to change and transform reality.
Koyasu built that second library from private loss. After his son died and his wife took her own life, he sold the family brewery, donated the old building and his collection, paid for renovations, and endowed a foundation.
As we find out, grief still controls the property—its board is nominal, its dead founder continues to advise his successor, and much of the building remains unused. Public access has redirected a dead man's resources toward people he will never know.
A recent study of the novel's nostalgia identifies the mountain library as the place where the narrator begins to test his preserved past against time. Its daily practice sharpens that account: he changes because a library makes him responsible for desires that remain outside his control.
Koyasu calls the building a place for “lost hearts,” though it cannot cure either his grief or the narrator's. Once patrons choose and return books, however, his loss no longer determines everything the building contains or does.
The criticism that the novel repeats and over-explains has force at the level of individual scenes. Murakami often states a correspondence after he has already staged it, thinning the uncertainty his images create. Across the three-part structure, recurrence does different work. The stove, the basement, the bereaved director, and the isolated reader return with different relations among them; without the repeated furnishings and roles, those alterations would be harder to see.
The Map That Comes Back Corrected
The decisive alteration begins without a conversation. A teenage patron—known by his Yellow Submarine parka—appears to have listened unseen while the narrator recounted the City at Koyasu's grave. The boy later delivers a map assembled from those scattered descriptions. Its river, clock tower, gate, wall, and bookless library are nearly exact. The narrator copies the map, pencils in seven corrections, and sends it back; the next version incorporates every change.
The sequence—telling, drawing, correction, revision—restores another mind to the making of the City. The City first emerged through an exchange between the narrator and the vanished girl, then became his private construction when she disappeared. The boy treats the story as working material: he turns speech into a new artifact, submits it to criticism, and returns a “revised edition.”
His map also interferes with its source. Looking at the clock tower drawn without hands, the narrator wonders whether he had ever described it or whether his memory has adjusted itself to match the image.
Cause and effect become uncertain. Another reader's version has begun to press backward on the world it represents.
Koyasu names this exchange an inheritance and compares it to the narrator's succession at the public library. The comparison removes the narrator from the role of gatekeeper. A bequest can be offered, corrected, or refused; its recipient determines what survives. The boy's City therefore differs in small details from the narrator's. It has been made fit for another person.
When Reading Alters the City
Part Three completes that transfer through the old dreams. After the boy appears inside the City, he and the narrator briefly inhabit one consciousness. The narrator can coax a dream from its shell without following its tale; the boy can interpret every part of the tale without releasing it. Together they form a cooperative reader: one pair of hands opens the object, and another mind receives its language.
The office itself has changed. A position once defined by solitary appointment now depends on complementary abilities: the first Dream Reader performed the ritual while most of its meaning passed through him; his successor can read. In return, the boy opens the immense library stored in his memory, letting the narrator read Homer, Tanizaki, Ian Fleming, and agricultural annuals inside a town whose shelves contain no books. Texts selected in the public world cross the wall inside another reader.
When the boy prepares to replace the narrator as Dream Reader, he predicts that the City and its wall “will change ever so slightly to fit in with me.” He promises neither demolition nor escape. His presence requires a supposedly perfect form to admit an adjustment.
Murakami's afterword gives this late movement a compositional history. He completed Part One, waited six months, and decided that it was insufficient; Parts Two and Three followed. He describes fiction itself as a limited set of motifs transformed through new approaches.
The boy supplies the internal version of that method, receiving an old imaginative world, reading what its former custodian could not, and altering what its continuation requires.
The Cost of Succession
The inheritance carries a human cost the novel never resolves.
The boy disappears from a locked house on a freezing night wearing only pajamas. His parents and brothers search for him; one plausible account has him lost in the mountains. The narrator knows about the map, suspects that the boy has crossed into the City, and lies to the family about possessing the final version. Later he finds a wooden doll that he interprets as the boy's cast-off bodily shell. None of this proves that the family has lost a son to another world rather than to exposure and death.
Koyasu insists that the boy has chosen the world best suited to him, while the surrounding evidence unsettles his assurance. A City that alters itself around the boy's abilities may offer accommodation; it may also turn social failure into a supernatural vocation. The public library gave him books, routine, and a shared room among other people, but it could not keep him among them. Inside the wall he says there is no living person waiting to catch him, so he will remain where time has stopped.
The narrator can leave once the boy agrees to remain. He blows out the candle and leaps toward his other self, although the book ends before any landing. Freedom passes unevenly between them: one man can leave because another reader stays to keep the dreams speaking.
At the beginning, shelves without books serve an appointed man who can release stories but scarcely interpret them. By the close, a new reader carries ordinary books into the City, hears the old dreams clearly, and expects the wall to make room.
The City Murakami carried for four decades survives through that transfer of authority.
Its wall shifts for a new reader while, in the other world, his family searches the winter mountains.
Sources
1. Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, translated by Philip Gabriel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024). Primary text, including the afterword.
2. “Behind the Perfect Wall: Murakami Haruki's The City and Its Uncertain Walls”, British Association for Japanese Studies, 2026. A digest of Ziwei Xuan's “The Ambivalent Utopia,” Japan Forum, which reads the Z** library as the narrator's movement from unexamined nostalgia toward a critical relation with the past. Journal article and DOI.
3. “The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami review — a labour of love”, The Guardian, 2024. A. K. Blakemore's review supplies the counterclaim that the novel's repetition, explanatory prose, and long library section produce stasis rather than development.
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