THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS: THE ARCHITECTURE OF LOSS, MEMORY, AND THE SELF
A close reading of The City and Its Uncertain Walls: the inner worlds built by grief, the divided self, and the cost of returning to reality.
Some losses do not leave our lives; they simply change form. They cease to be a person and become a city. High walls rise around them, a gatekeeper is stationed at the entrance, and within those walls emerges a world where time no longer moves and nothing ever entirely dies. The city in Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls is precisely such a place: less of a geographical location than the architectural form loss assumes within the mind.
At the centre of the novel is an unnamed narrator who, years later, reaches the mysterious city described by the girl he loved when he was seventeen. But to enter it, he must leave his shadow behind. Inside the city, he encounters the girl herself, yet the young woman before him does not recognise him. And so, even as the narrator appears to have found the person he was searching for, he is confronted with loss in its purest form: the physical presence of someone we love is not enough to restore the memory of them that belongs to us.
Murakami is pursuing a question far more unsettling than a love story: can the world we create within ourselves to preserve someone we have lost eventually become the world that imprisons us?
A CITY REBUILT FORTY YEARS LATER
The city itself is the product of a kind of return. Murakami published the first version of the story, built around the same central idea, in 1980, yet carried it within him for decades as unfinished work. In 2020, at a time when the world had closed down and visible and invisible walls had risen between people, he returned to the old story and expanded it into the novel we know today.
This history does not reduce the novel to a simple pandemic allegory. Even so, its central preoccupations like isolation, the tension between inside and outside, the desire to reach another person resonate more sharply after such a period. Murakami does not merely rewrite an old story; as an older writer, he re-enters the world he created in his youth. The novel is therefore as much the writer’s confrontation with his former text as it is the narrator’s return to his lost love. The city becomes an inner space left unfinished by both character and author.
THE CITY: THE INNER ARCHITECTURE OF GRIEF
The walled city can be read as a projection of the narrator’s inner world. Time is uncertain there; even as the seasons pass, there is little sense of change. Its inhabitants have no shadows. Rather than flowing towards the future, the past circles endlessly around the same emotional centre. Everything has been preserved, yet nothing seems truly alive.
Grief contains a similar contradiction. We do not want to forget the person we have lost, but when we preserve them as a memory that can never change, we also begin to resist change within our own lives. A memory may first become a refuge, then an order, and finally a prison. The narrator’s attraction to the city is therefore more than a desire to be reunited with the girl he loved. The city promises him a sealed kind of wholeness, a place where he can be protected from the uncertainty of life, the responsibilities of adulthood, and the possibility of further loss.
But stillness is not the same as peace.
The tranquillity of the city arises not from the end of pain, but from the suspension of desire, conflict, and transformation. Psychologically, it resembles the way a person may narrow their relationship with the world after being wounded: never fully attaching to anything so as not to be hurt again, refusing to let in the new so as not to lose it, retreating into the self so as not to be abandoned. Walls protect, but at the same time, they make contact impossible.
AMBIGUOUS LOSS: MOURNING WITHOUT A FAREWELL
The narrator’s first love does not come to a definite end. The girl disappears without leaving behind an explicable separation or a completed farewell. What the narrator experiences therefore approaches what psychology calls “ambiguous loss”: the person is absent, yet their absence is neither certain nor complete; the relationship has ended, but it has never reached an ending within the mind.
Where there has been no farewell, the mind cannot write its own conclusion. It continues to generate possibilities: What if she returns? What if another truth lies behind what was said? What if, somewhere, she is still waiting for me, untouched by time? The narrator’s inability to forget her over the years stems from more than the intensity of first love. What matters is that the relationship was never completed. What remains unfinished continues to live within the mind because it cannot be given the grammar of the past.
The city is the ideal setting for such uncertainty. There, the girl is both present and absent. She stands before the narrator, yet does not remember him. The paradox of loss thus takes material form: the person being sought can be reached, but the relationship being sought cannot. What the narrator loves is no longer only the girl, but the self he believed possible beside her, the seventeen year-old who had not yet been eroded by life, whose future remained open, and who still believed that love could make the world whole.
The novel’s true loss, then, is greater than the loss of a single person. Along with the girl, the narrator has lost the possibilities of his own youth.
THE WALL: THE BOUNDARY OF THE SELF, THE BODY OF DEFENCE
The novel’s walls are uncertain because the boundaries of our inner worlds are not fixed. What we leave outside, what we allow in, and which memories we accept as “real” are always changing. The wall is, on one level, the psychological boundary that protects the self; on another, it is fear made solid.
In the aftermath of trauma and loss, the mind may partition emotions it cannot bear into separate chambers. Some memories are kept alive while others are repressed; some desires are idealised while the anger, guilt, or fear of abandonment they produce is left outside. The condition for entering Murakami’s city makes this division visible: to cross its threshold, one must relinquish one’s shadow.
It is the abandonment of a part of the self in exchange for an existence without pain.
In choosing to remain in the city, the narrator does not leave only the outside world behind. At the gate, he also abandons the part of himself that desires, doubts, experiences bodily needs, and reckons with the past. The walls cease to be merely the boundary between two worlds and become the division a person draws within himself: the line between the person he wishes to be and the person he disavows, between the remembered self and the self that continues to live, between preserved memory and changing reality.
THE SHADOW: THE ABANDONED SELF
Murakami’s image of the “shadow” evokes Jung’s concept of the shadow, yet the novel renders it too emotional and embodied to be reduced to any single theory. In Jungian terms, the shadow carries the traits, impulses, and possibilities that a person does not wish to admit into their conscious identity. In the novel, however, the shadow is not composed solely of what is dark or shameful within us. It also represents the instinct to live, the capacity for change, and our connection to the real world.
The narrator’s shadow is suspicious of the city. It wants to escape, to return outside, to survive. At first, the narrator regards it as something separate from himself, a disturbing voice. Yet the shadow’s objection is the repressed truth of the self: the flawless world built to protect him from pain is also depriving him of wholeness.
When we abandon our own shadow, we do not rid ourselves only of the parts we dislike. We also weaken our agency, our contradictions, our capacity for change, and our ability to form a genuine relationship with another person. Intimacy is not possible between flawless, frozen selves; it exists between people capable of carrying their incompleteness, their mutability, and sometimes their darkness.
The desire to reunite with the shadow, then, is not simply a desire to “return to the real world”. It is a willingness to accept one’s own fragmentation. To be whole is not to select only the beautiful and preservable parts of ourselves, but to assume responsibility for the restlessness that binds us to life.
THE LIBRARY AND THE OLD DREAMS: AN ARCHIVE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
The library within the city is one of the novel’s most powerful interior spaces. There, the narrator is tasked with reading the “old dreams” preserved inside the skulls of unicorns. These images seem designed not to be explained but to be felt; yet on a psychological level, the library resembles an archive of the unconscious, preserving the records of the self that cannot be put into words.
Dreams cannot be read as easily as personal memories. Rather than looking at them directly, one must approach them in darkness, guided by touch and intuition. It is much like the way a repressed feeling reveals itself not in a clear sentence, but through recurring images, bodily sensations, seemingly inexplicable fears, and unfinished stories.
The unicorn skulls bring beauty and death together within the same object. The unicorn may symbolise purity and unattainability, while the skull suggests that such purity can be perfectly preserved only once it has been stripped of life. The narrator’s first love has been preserved in his mind in much the same way: removed from the mutability of a living person and transformed into an image capable of resisting time.
But to perfect someone in memory is not to continue knowing them. Sometimes memory is not the place where we protect the person we loved; it is the place where we deny them the right to change.
IDEALISATION: THE BELOVED, OR THE POSSIBILITY THAT WAS LOST?
First love is often more than the love felt for another person. It is also an attachment to the self that first became possible in another person’s gaze. Beside the girl, the narrator feels more meaningful, more whole, and as though he belongs to another world. When she disappears, that version of the self vanishes with her. His search for her years later is therefore not only an attempt to recover a former beloved, but a desire to summon back the person he once was beside her.
Idealisation makes loss bearable. As the lost person becomes perfected within the mind, the ordinary conflicts, disappointments, and mundanity of the relationship disappear. Yet as this perfect image grows, no relationship in the real world can compete with it. A person remains faithful not to a love once lived, but to a possibility that can no longer be tested.
Murakami romanticises this fidelity even as he questions it. To remember someone for years may reveal the depth of love; but sometimes, the inability to forget is simply a more poetic name for the refusal to return to one’s own life. The line between fidelity to memory and withdrawal from life is as uncertain as the novel’s walls.
REALITY: THE FRAGILE WORLD WE AGREE UPON
In Murakami’s world, reality and dream do not exclude one another. The walled city is not insignificant because it is “imagined”, nor is the outside world superior because it is “real”. Both are part of the narrator’s experience. The novel’s central question is not which world is objectively real, but which world allows a person to go on living.
The library in the mountain town functions as a temporary threshold the narrator establishes between these two worlds. Mr Koyasu’s presence, the unusual relationship with books formed by the boy who always wears a Yellow Submarine hoodie, and the altered sense of time in this place all make the boundary between the city and everyday life more permeable. Reality appears less like solid ground than a fragile agreement we sustain with others.
The boy in the Yellow Submarine hoodie is especially significant. He does not merely read words; he absorbs texts as though he could carry them within himself. His relationship with the world differs from conventional social codes, yet he is able to move between the two realities with a naturalness the narrator cannot attain. His presence suggests that the self is not a closed and immutable essence, but a permeable structure shaped by encounters, transmissions, and the stories of others.
Sometimes we cannot find our way out of our inner world alone. Another person’s voice, a book, a library, or an unexpected intimacy opens a door in the wall that we had never seen before.
FROM MELANCHOLIA TO MOURNING: CARRYING LOSS WITHIN
One of the fundamental differences between mourning and melancholia lies in the relationship loss establishes with the self. In mourning, a person can accept what has been lost and form a new inner bond with it. In melancholia, loss becomes buried within the self; the person can no longer fully distinguish what has been lost because the lost object has become part of their identity.
For a long time, the narrator’s life bears the traces of this second state. The girl is not merely someone from his past; her absence becomes the means through which he defines himself. In other words, the narrator does not live through the loss; he lives inside it.
Returning to the city is therefore both a regression and a necessary confrontation. Sometimes, in order to leave the past behind, we must first consciously re-enter the space it created. Healing, however, does not mean declaring that the city never existed or attempting to destroy it. Healing means understanding the purpose the walls once served and deciding when the gate must finally be opened.
To move beyond loss is not to erase what has been lost. It is to make it a part of life rather than the whole of it.
LEARNING HOW TO LEAVE
In this novel, Murakami does not explain the borders between worlds, nor does he bind every action of his characters to a psychological cause. Instead, he keeps us suspended within uncertainty. Loss, memory, and the self are not riddles that can ever be solved completely.
The novel’s deepest movement is not the discovery of the city. It is learning how to leave it.
To leave is not to render what happened within those walls meaningless. Nor is it to deny the reality of first love, abandon memory, or cease to dream. To leave is to love without freezing what we love in time, to carry the past without placing it where the present should be, and to refuse to leave any part of ourselves to die on the other side of the wall.
This is why Murakami’s city feels familiar to us all. Within every person, there is a place where time moves differently, where no one else can fully enter, and where certain names never grow old. Old dreams are stored there; shadows wait at the gate; the walls protect us sometimes from the world, and sometimes from ourselves.
The question is not whether we possess such a city. The question is whether we can recognise when we are taking refuge there and when we have become its prisoner. For we become free not by abandoning the past, but by learning to pass through its walls with our shadow beside us.
And when the novel ends, what remains is the question Murakami leaves behind in silence: Can we leave the worlds we created to preserve what we lost, so that we might learn to live again?
Note: I have been working on this post slowly for a few weeks. I took my sweet time indeed but I also wanted this post to be worthy so much. Murakami is such an author that you dig into a whole different world whilst you're reading and then when you start to think about it you dug a bit more deeper and once you start to write about your thoughts you enter a whole another realm. I wanted to express this as fluid and transparent as I can, with the hint of a guilt deriving from not having posted for a very long time, hoping this would make up for my absence.
