Reflection on A City and its Uncertain Walls

I just finished the entirety of A City and its Uncertain Walls and out of all the Murakami books I have read, this one is my favorite. At first glance, it feels very similar Hard Boiled Wonderland and has many elements from Kafka on the Shore. However, this all changes when you find out that Mr. Koyasu is in fact a ghost. From that point on, I couldn't put the book down. At first, my initial interpretation was that in Part 2, the MC wakes up as his full self, even though it was his shadow that left and not his real self. Throughout this part, there are many references to this fact that despite his original wishes, whether it be him saying that he just woke up in this body despite this decision, or him actually having his shadow in the real world, compared to Mr. Koyasu who doesn't have one. This was the line of thinking that I held up until the last line of Chapter 62:

"Did you know that? The two of us are nothing more than someone else's shadows." (Murakami 406).

With this line, it came to me that A City and its Uncertain Walls told the story of someone within a constant state of dissociation. While experiencing dissociative episodes, you feel like you are in the backseat and not in control of your life. However, I have never considered the point of view of who was in the drivers seat, which in this case would be the shadow. In this book, the shadows represent the true selves of the characters while the inhabitants in the walls are only a husk of their past selves. There is no happiness, no sadness, just numbness as you carry out the repetitive tasks of a mundane life. This is where the real you is buried, under layers of depression and isolation, surrounded by an imaginary, high wall in your consciousness that changes shape depending on your internal state. When the MC and his shadow attempt to break out and are stopped by the wall, this is your own mind attempting to keep you from getting better. The world outside, is a scary, fucked up place that you aren't in control of, whereas the depths of your mind feel safe to you, being something that you have control over. Whether it be analyzing old dreams, which could possibly be old hopes and aspirations / old memories of yourself, or guarding the most inner layer of your consciousness and never allowing anything in or out, these seem much easier than presenting yourself to the real world. Similarly, with dissociation, you don't realize you are dissociating until you suddenly snap out of it, just like the shadow did at the end of part 2. So it makes sense why the shadow and the reader would think that the entirely of part 2 is told in the perspective of the real MC. 

One can also take into account that Murakami picked up writing this novel in March of 2020 when the Covid-19 Pandemic hit Japan. In more ways than one, this can be seen as another source of isolation and depression seen throughout this novel and why it may sound so different than his other works. He writes in a bit more detail about this fact in the afterword of this book, where he believes this fact to be significant in its production and that he "...feel[s] it in [his] bones." For anyone who was really intrigued by part 1, I highly recommend finishing the rest of the book and or at least reading up to page 200 before deciding to quit or not!

- Angus