Haruki Murakami’s latest novel is a fight against aging

It’s an hour to midnight in mid-November. The Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York is filled with tote bag-sporting, literature-loving Millennials sipping on Japanese green tea and sake from a local distillery, while munching on muffins inspired by novelist Haruki Murakami—or Murakuffins—from Milk Bar. Conversation is flowing easily as they await the release of Murakami’s latest novel, The City and its Uncertain Walls, which has been translated into English by Philip Gabriel. One of the bookstore employees reads out the eleventh question of a 20-question trivia game about Murakami’s life, as pockets of people giddily whisper their answers to one another around the bookstore.

As I walk around the bookstore with my partner, I realize that between the two of us, we’re able to answer almost every single one of these trivia questions. Somehow over the years of building my literary repertoire, I had retained specific and well-known knowledge about the novelist—like how he considers The Great Gatsby one of the greatest literary achievements, or that he decided to start writing just before turning 30. Murakami also values physical fitness, stamina, and routine, and claims to not give value to criticism (more on this later).

At around 11:40 p.m., four teams of winners are announced, along with a handful of others who have found golden tickets hidden around the store for more prizes. And after a 10-second countdown, right at midnight, a large cloth covering is swept from a long wooden table to reveal shiny stacks of the new book we’ve all been waiting for.

Murakami is one of the few authors today who can lure in readers worldwide for a midnight release party. As an Asian woman who has grown to have increasingly conflicting thoughts about Murakami over the years due to the way he writes about women, it is surprising to see that a large contingent of the attendees are women as well. The attendees’ demographics skew from about late-20s to mid-50s, and about 70 percent white. Despite the more problematic aspects of his writing, it’s clear that Murakami continues to have a strong chokehold on mainstream literary groups, at least in New York. 

The City and its Uncertain Walls is a return to one of Murakami’s earlier works, a novella published in 1980 in Japan when he was 31. Dissatisfied with the result, Murakami had actually revisited the novella earlier and published Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in 1985. In fact, a newly translated edition of the novella was published earlier this month using the “original Japanese title of the book, which was later inverted for foreign publications,” as described by Penguin Random House—which I thought was a particularly clever and thoughtful nod to his notoriety as a globally known writer. 

One could argue that this new novel, released six years after his last, is a pandemic novel—even Murakami was not immune from the literary wave of authors who wrote more introspectively while housebound, as described by author R.F. Kuang—as he began writing it in March 2020 and stayed mostly indoors to write about “the town surrounded by walls (that) might be viewed as a metaphor for the worldwide lockdown,” as he shares in an interview with NPR, and the co-existence of the themes of “extreme isolation and warm feelings of empathy.” Gauging from recent interviews, Murakami has seemingly stayed in a wall of his own as he reckons with his own aging, now 75, by returning to re-excavate his earlier works during this later part of his writing career. It seems, though, that he doesn’t really have anything new to say.

Murakami’s distinct voice has become a hallmark of his work. His writing usually emerges as an unfiltered exploration of his thoughts and feelings, through the vehicle of a male character whose characterization is tinged with social isolation tendencies and a love of more wholesome things like music, art, and books—with cats often symbolizing another realm of existence, prodding the male character into alternate modes of reality.

“When I read his first work, Hear the Wind Sing, I felt, ‘Here’s someone who could write about our generation, using the language of our generation,” Tufts University professor Hosea Hirata tells JoySauce. Hirata first met Murakami and his wife Yoko in 1991 when they lived in a townhouse close by. “We became good friends, having parties, faithfully watching Twin Peaks together every week."

In an article for Tufts Now, Hirata discusses how Murakami’s novels provide a solace for aging. “I think Haruki has the sense that we exist as a fragment of something, and we are much more connected to the world than we conceive,” he says in the article.

Hirata shares with JoySauce that reading Murakami’s work clarified, “that we do not have to understand things by explanations. That there’s a voice that comes from the unknown.” As director of the international literary and visual studies program at Tufts, who teaches courses on Murakami’s work, one of the things Hirata hopes his students take away about Murakami is how the author “works so hard to communicate something to you. You need to respond to his effort as a fellow human being.”

But what happens when that fellow human being does not respond to his readers? When asked about a pervasive common critique regarding the way he writes his female characters in his recent NPR interview, Murakami says, “at a certain point I completely stopped reading criticism (it's true), and I'm sorry but I don't know the context of that particular criticism."

The simplicity of his writing pairs well with the depth of the human condition he seemingly explores. But that impulse seems to end with his female characters.

Herein lies one of the junctures of where my conflicting feelings about Murakami arise. As a reader, I can appreciate the magical realism and surrealism present in his stories and the psychological interiority of his characters. The simplicity of his writing pairs well with the depth of the human condition he seemingly explores. But that impulse seems to end with his female characters. My friends who are more loyal fans of Murakami, mostly men, argue that he provides an honest portrayal of the subconscious drives of his male characters—who themselves believe to be misunderstood. Therefore through the male gaze of his novels, women are often sexualized and described as exotic beings who the protagonists usually fixate on due to a pull beyond their control. These women who are often just out of reach then bring the men on a journey—either through pursuit or chance—that is solely in service of the male protagonist.

Novelist Mieko Kawakami once asked Murakami in an interview about how in his novels, “the woman functions as a kind oracle, in that she’s made to act as a medium of fate.” She goes on to say that when women are relegated to these roles with their sexuality at the fore, they are determined to be sexually regarded. In response, Murakami pushes back and says, “this may not be the most satisfying explanation, but I don’t think any of my characters are that complex. The focus is on the interface, or how these people, both men and women, engage with the world they’re living in. If anything, I take great care not to dwell too much on the meaning of existence, its importance or its implications.”

In The City and its Uncertain Walls, the protagonist spends his life longing to be with a mysterious woman he fell in love with at age 17. The woman remains the same age and is portrayed as an enigmatic and attractive being while the protagonist ages and evolves as a character. His search for her brings him to different places while she remains a device in the novel, much like a lot of his previous works. If Murakami works so hard to self-express and give readers “something to ponder after they’ve finished [the] books,” according to the New Yorker, doesn’t willfully disregarding criticism when he sees fit suggest a refusal by him to reflect on or ponder those same books? Murakami goes on to share with the New Yorker that, “if people enjoy my work, it makes me happy, of course, but if they don't then all I can do is tell them I'm sorry.”

In the Tufts article, Horea says, “Haruki fights aging, I think,” pointing to Murakami’s impressive regard for a strict physical and sleep routine. Horea shares that Murakami’s young characters “often look back on their lives the way older people do. There’s a sense of nostalgia for days when we had more uncomplicated hope or happiness, which take on a mythological structure like the Garden of Eden—a timeless, immortal golden age that continues to nourish us, that we’re driven to search for in the future.”

Murakami’s return to an older work to recycle it into a newer form highlights this fight against aging. It also shows his resistance towards growing into a more complicated world where his male characters and their deviant thoughts risk becoming relics—all from his own doing. A world in which I, as a woman of color, would feel more comfortable and actualized. Murakami prides himself on the fact that his audiences re-read his work every so often and are able to take away something different every time. But what happens when the takeaway is that he doesn’t have anything more profound to say? When, rather than evolve as a writer, he chooses to hide behind the comfortable, all-too-certain walls of his self-constructed city?

In his interview with the New Yorker, Murakami reflects that while he has changed a lot and become more proficient as a writer, he asks, “Have I likewise changed a lot as a person? That’s a tough question, and the more I think about it the less I can say conclusively. Rewriting this work has certainly got me thinking more deeply, though, about that question.” What Murakami doesn’t seem to realize is that his readers do and will change over the years. Like human beings, literature does age and, when that time comes, I don’t know if it will fare in Murakami’s favor.