The Meanings of the Shadows

 I kept thinking about the meaning behind the shadows after class today, and I'm not sure if I'm entirely correct, but here are just my two cents. The shadows are the real selves, because they represent confronting the world with all its suffering, including old age, death, loss, sadness, and pain. The residents of the other world are ghosts, besides the protagonist. The protagonist created the world with his vivid imagination, based on his dead girlfriend's descriptions of the walled city, but the world's powers eventually grew beyond him, attracting the real ghosts of spirits, including that of his girlfriend. In that way, the protagonist is somehow supernaturally gifted, or this is all just in his head.

The ghosts still retain some semblance of memory or personality because it's impossible to be completely rid of those vestiges of emotions. However, they are all trapped in this walled city, which resembles some kind of limbo or purgatory, because they all have things they fear and are avoidant of, such as the old man's experience of seeing the other side of the beautiful ghost's face in the hot spring hotel. The walled city seems to be a conscious entity in and of itself, as it actively prevents the residents from ever leaving and seeks to maintain its equilibrium through the deaths of the beasts. What would happen if one of the residents, supposing they escaped through the whirlpool, reached the outside world? Well, because characters like the dead girlfriend are definitely dead, supposing she was not a completely fictional person created by Boku, I would imagine she would reunite with her shadow and move on to the afterlife. Regarding the transition from when the shadow jumped into the pool to when Boku finds himself working at a library, to me, Boku has never physically left the "real world." Although in Murakami, what happens in the "other" world always shows its signs in the real world, such as when it starts raining fish in Shibuya in Kafka on the Shore, there seems to be a divide between the real and the other world. Likewise, the events of Hardboiled Wonderland occurred while the protagonist's real body stayed in a coma. So I'm guessing we are viewing things from the shadow's perspective when he returns to the library, and the part of the soul of the protagonist that decides to stay in the walled city is still there. Because Boku is now divided and incomplete, missing a part of his soul, he becomes like a semi-ghost, and his presence now goes unnoticed by many others.