What is the shadow

Since I have read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in addition to The City and Its Uncertain Walls, I became very curious about what the shadow, a symbol that carries enormous weight in both novels, actually represents.

In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, the shadow is explicitly linked to human emotion, or more precisely, to the capacity for love. Both novels share a crucial detail: the protagonist never fully loses his shadow. It is taken away, yes, but it continues to exist under the Gatekeeper's custody rather than dying. This incomplete separation is what allows the narrator to fall in love with the library girl. The girl, on the other hand, has no shadow at all, which means she has no access to that emotional register and cannot perceive his feelings for her.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland adds another layer through the forest outside the Town. People who have not been fully stripped of their shadows are driven out to live there, including the girl's mother. When the narrator enters the forest, he finds far fewer residents than he expected. This detail, read alongside the frozen clock on the tower, suggests something important. Inside the Town, time has stopped entirely. But the forest's shrinking population implies that time there continues to move forward. The conclusion seems to be: people who still have their shadows exist within flowing time, while those without shadows are frozen, outside of time altogether.

This leads me to argue that the shadow is not a secondary attachment to the self. It is the self, or at least the core of personhood. The residents of the Town possess people's appearance, voice, habits, and manner of speaking, but they carry none of their interiority. They are physical replicas without a soul. The shadow, meanwhile, desperately wants to escape, while the narrator's physical body is strangely content to remain. That tension, I think, is the clearest evidence of all: if the body wants to stay and the shadow wants to leave, it is the shadow that is doing the wanting.

Boran