A clock tower without hands. A wall so perfect that neither wind nor cannon can breach it. A town where everything is eternal, and where, to enter, you must surrender your shadow.
The walled-in town in Murakami Haruki鈥檚 The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2024) looks, at first glance, like a refuge. Its walls curve gently, like a binding ribbon. Social harmony is absolute. No one quarrels, no one suffers, no one ages. Residents are assigned roles and carry them out without friction. For the novel鈥檚 narrator, a forty-year-old man still haunted by the disappearance of his teenage love twenty-three years earlier, the town promises exactly what nostalgia always promises: that the past can be preserved whole, that loss can be undone. The girl he loved claimed her 鈥榬eal self鈥� lived inside this town, and so the town becomes the place where he might find her again.
But perfection has a price. To enter, you must surrender your shadow, and along with it your memories, your emotions, and your capacity to change. The girl is there, identical in appearance, but she does not remember him. She is a shell fashioned from yearning, someone to sit beside but never speak to. The town鈥檚 flawless surface conceals a void. Its stability costs its residents the things the narrator came looking for.
Scholars have often treated nostalgia in Murakami鈥檚 fiction as a dead end, a symptom of disillusionment and the inability to process history. The narrator initially seems to confirm these readings. For over two decades, he has been frozen in place. He keeps the girl鈥檚 letters, written in turquoise-blue ink, and her white gauze handkerchief. He rereads them obsessively, lamenting the summer when he was seventeen. He cannot see the point of being with anyone else.
What the sociologist Fred Davis calls 鈥楽imple Nostalgia鈥� captures this condition well: an unexamined, emotionally driven conviction that the past was simply better. At this level, nostalgia downplays hardship, idealises what is gone, and offers no way forward. The narrator鈥檚 retreat into the walled town is Simple Nostalgia made architectural, a timeless utopia where no one ages, no one grieves, and no one remembers.
The turning point arrives outside the town, in a modest, pre-digital library in a provincial Japanese town called Z**. The Z** Town Library is everything the walled town is not. Where the town demands conformity and the surrender of personal history, the library is intimate, unregulated, and built from one man鈥檚 private grief.
That man is Mr Koyasu, the library鈥檚 former director, who becomes the narrator鈥檚 mentor. Koyasu has also lost someone: his wife Miri. But he has not retreated into timelessness. He has woven Miri鈥檚 memory into a continuing life, and he recognises that his love for her, for all its pain, still sustains him. Under his influence, the narrator begins to do something he has resisted for decades. He questions his own memories. Was his attachment to the girl a mature bond, or a teenage infatuation he never outgrew? Was the town a sanctuary, or a prison he built for himself?
This is what Davis calls 鈥楻eflexive Nostalgia鈥�, the moment when the rose-tinted lens cracks and a person starts comparing the idealised past with present reality. It is uncomfortable but also the beginning of movement.
The narrator鈥檚 deepening relationship with a woman who runs a local caf茅 pushes this further. She asks him to wait for her, just as the girl once did, and the echo forces him to ask what he has been waiting for all this time. Whether he ever really understood what it was. Past and present begin to overlap rather than oppose each other. The narrator realises he is no longer seventeen. What he wants now is something warmer and more uncertain: the gentle warmth beneath another person鈥檚 defensive wall, the rhythmic beat of a heart pulsing beneath.
This personal journey carries broader resonances. Murakami has described the tension between individuals and oppressive social structures as a confrontation with a 鈥榳all of the system,鈥� a phrase he uses in Novelist as a Vocation when discussing Japan鈥檚 education system, but which echoes throughout his fiction. The walled-in town, read in this light, becomes more than one man鈥檚 psychological refuge. It becomes a figure for any structure that holds together by keeping memory out.
The parallel with postwar Japan is hard to miss. The nation鈥檚 rapid reconstruction after 1945 delivered extraordinary prosperity, but it also involved what some historians have described as a prescriptive forgetting, an implicit agreement not to look too closely at the continuities between wartime and postwar structures. Beneath the surface of a conflict-free, harmonious, modern society lay organisational pillars firmly planted in the unexamined past. The town鈥檚 demand that residents relinquish their shadows mirrors this dynamic: peace and order, but at the cost of historical consciousness.
But the novel places its alternative in a small, handmade space. The Z** Town Library, informal, personal, managed in a pre-digital way and free from institutional oversight, might be what Murakami envisions as a 鈥榮pace for individual recovery,鈥� a place apart from hierarchy, efficiency, and bullying. In the novel鈥檚 logic, it is within such spaces that people can dust off their memories, let in fresh air, and begin the slow work of constructing a self that holds together across time.
In the final chapters, the narrator returns to the walled town. This time he is not seeking refuge. He says goodbye to the girl, recognising her at last as a figure the town prepared for him rather than the person he lost. And then he does something no protagonist in Murakami鈥檚 earlier variations of this story has managed. He blows out the candle and leaves. Not through the prescribed route, the pool that swallowed previous characters into nothingness, but on his own terms.
To leave the town is to accept that the past cannot be lived in, only revisited. A backward glance that steadies you for what comes next.
The narrator steps out. The wall stays. But time, at last, begins to flow again.
This post is based on Ziwei Xuan, 鈥楾he Ambivalent Utopia: Layers of Nostalgia and Memory in Murakami Haruki鈥檚 The City and Its Uncertain Walls,鈥� Japan Forum. Read the full article [].
