「经济学人」The City and Its Uncertain Walls

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Strange and familiar places What Haruki Murakami's fans get wrong about him He is not so much a surrealist as a dogged observer of solitude The City and Its Uncertain Walls . By Haruki Murakami. Knopf; 464 pages; $21.50. Harvill Secker; £25 PHILIP ROTH never really left New Jersey. Saul Bellow could not keep his characters out of Chicago. And Haruki Murakami’s narrators—unmarried, often middle-aged men with solitary habits—continually slip into eerie netherworlds. The alternate realm in the Japanese writer’s latest novel is the same one in which the narrator was marooned at the end of “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” (1985). It is a town surrounded by an impregnable wall and governed by an inscrutable, imposing Gatekeeper. In “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” this locale—where the nameless narrator reads “old dreams” from unicorn skulls in a library—was part of the narrator’s subconscious. It was a place he had created in his own mind. In “The City ………………………………