Haruki Murakami’s New Novel Doesn’t Feel All That New

THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel.

When we first meet the nameless narrator of Haruki Murakami’s eerie new novel, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” he is a high school loner whose only friend is his cat. A chance meeting at a school awards ceremony brings him into the orbit of an equally isolated eccentric 16-year-old who can’t always distinguish her dreams from real life.

These two misfits strike up an ambiguous relationship, writing letters, talking endlessly, making out. The girl recounts her fantastic dreams, some of them erotic, and in no time at all our narrator falls calamitously in love: “I was so taken by you, I thought of nothing else when awake. You haunted my dreams, as well.”

The boy longs for his maybe-girlfriend, in the biblical way, and at first his inamorata seems 100 percent down. “I want to be yours,” she confesses. “Completely totally yours … in every way there is. Yours from top to bottom. I want to be one with you. I mean it.”

But then, in a wild addendum, the girl requests that they take it slow because she isn’t her real self; the person in front of the narrator is “only a stand-in,” a “wandering shadow.” “My real self — the real me — is in a town far away, living a completely different life. A town surrounded by a high wall that doesn’t have a name.”

Someone else might have taken the hint, but our infatuated narrator ain’t about to let some corporeal confusion discourage him. He asks: “Can I go to that town … where the real you lives?”

For the rest of the summer the two talk endlessly about the strange town, with its sentient walls, unicorns, handless clocks and residents who lack shadows. Turns out the girl’s real self works at the town library, which is stocked not with books but with old dreams. If the boy ever reaches the town, reaches the real her, the girl promises he can become the town’s Dream Reader, who reads all the library’s dreams.