The City and Its Uncertain Walls: A Novel

From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these peculiar times.

“Spellbinding. . . . [An] oddly irresistible fable.” –The Wall Street Journal 

“It is with unabashed joy that I am here to report: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Murakami’s first novel in six years, is also one of his best. It feels at once sweeping and intimate, grand and tender, quiet and charged with feeling. . . .  A paean to books, reading, and libraries, an investigation into the relationship between romance and realism, and a timely fable about how relationships, societies, and communities both protect themselves against threats and foster beauty and truth.” –The Boston Globe 

[Murakami’s] imagination is one of a kind, and his blend of pop culture, postmodernism and Japanese mythology is a wholly unique contribution to literature.” – The Washington Post  

The long-awaited new novel from Haruki Murakami, his first in six years, revisits a Town his readers will remember, a place where a Dream Reader reviews dreams and where our shadows become untethered from our selves. A love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for these strange post-pandemic times, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.

About the Author

HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and one of the most recent of his many international honors is the Cino Del Duca World Prize, whose previous recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Ismail Kadare, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Author Residence: Tokyo, Japan

Author Hometown: Kyoto, Japan