The City and Its Uncertain Walls

The latest work from award-winning Murakami (Novelist as a Vocation) transports readers to a small town where residents have lost their own shadows, clocks have no hands, and the high wall surrounding the community can move and change its boundaries. A young man infatuated with a 16-year-old girl narrates. With the girl’s help, he becomes a “dream reader” in a library without books or textual materials. He explores different realities as he delves into the dreams he experiences while reading. In his mid-40s, he finally finds a fulfilling position as head librarian in a rural area many miles away. Along a walking path between work, home, and the local cemetery, he frequents a coffee shop and befriends its owner. When he stops by one evening to have dinner with the coffee shop owner, she has just finished reading Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. That magical realism tale sheds a floodlight of insight into the narrator’s mind, just as Murakami’s book, a masterpiece, will with readers.