There’s a kind of system in the universe called a binary star, where two stars orbit a shared center of mass, circling each other, their outer atmospheres warped by mutual gravity. The self and the subconscious are a bit like two stars entwined in the darkness, surrounded by an infinite universe. The shadowless little town walled in by towering ramparts in The City and Its Uncertain Walls feels something like that. What stays with me most is the shadow. It isn’t the weaker half — the “shadow” outside the wall is more alive than the body inside it: it feels pain, desire, death. The body inside finds peace, but grows ever more like an empty shell. Murakami never spells it out (that slyness is his trademark), but the direction is clear enough: the wall isn’t just a defense, it carries a strain of self-punishment too. The protagonist isn’t trapped inside — he doesn’t want to leave.

In the afterword, Murakami notes that the novel went through several revisions and took more than forty years to finally be published. The endless reworking of an idea may be one of the most valuable things about human intelligence — or perhaps one of the most time-consuming. As a reader, you can sense the accumulated weight of the author’s life experience folded into the text — and that, on the whole, feels like a good thing. Of course, a master storyteller never makes it easy to deconstruct his own method. Why write an “old novel” at all? Probably only he knows the answer.