"Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn't this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?"We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, the girl tells the boy about a mysterious Town surrounded by a high wall. In that Town, the girl tells him, her real self resides—and if the boy could manage to come along, she might not recognize him, but he would find his own place. He could be a Dream Reader, each night reading old dreams. He isn’t sure if he should believe her. But then, one day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life. Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and this other world, a Town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along. A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these strange postpandemic times, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is the story of a Town familiar to Haruki Murakami’s readers—and a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.
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