I generally dislike adding an afterword to my novels (in most cases, they sound like I’m trying to justify myself ), but with this novel I feel I need a word of explanation.
The core of the novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls lies in a novella (or long short story) I published in 1980 in the literary magazine Bungakukai entitled The City, and Its Uncertain Walls. It came to a little over 150 pages of handwritten manuscript pages in length. I published it in the magazine but wasn’t satisfied with it (all kinds of circumstances before and after led up to it, and I felt as a novel it was a bit raw), so I never allowed it to be reprinted in book form. Nearly all my fiction has appeared in book form, but this work alone was never published as a book, either in Japan or in other countries.
Still, from the first I felt that this work contained something vital for me. At the time, though, unfortunately I lacked the skills as a writer to adequately convey what that something was. I’d just debuted as a novelist then and didn’t have a good idea of what I was capable, and incapable, of writing. I regretted publishing the story, but figured what was done was done. Someday, when the time was right, I thought, I’d take my time to rework it, but till then would keep it on the back burner.
When I wrote this shorter novel, I was running a jazz bar in Tokyo. I was handling two jobs at once, life was hectic, and it was hard to focus on writing. I enjoyed running the bar (I loved music, and the place did well), but after I finished writing two novels the desire to earn my living solely by writing took hold of me, so I closed up shop and became a full-time writer.
So I settled down to write full-time and finished my first large-scale novel, A Wild Sheep Chase. This was in 1982. I planned to next move on to a complete revision of The City, and Its Uncertain Walls, but I realized it would be a stretch to make this story into a full-length novel so instead decided to add a completely different type of story to it and make it a kind of double feature.
I wrote the work as two alternating, parallel stories. At the end the two would combine into one—at least that was the rough idea. I had no set plan from the start and just wrote what I felt like writing, so even I, the author, had no clue how the two storylines were supposed to merge.
A pretty haphazard approach, if you think about it, but even so I was always optimistic (or maybe fearless), sure that it would sort itself out. I was confident, I guess, that things would work out well in the end. And sure enough, as I got near the end the two storylines did rather neatly link up, like two crews digging a tunnel, one from each end, breaking through and meeting up in the exact middle.
Writing Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was a thrilling experience for me. And a lot of fun, as well. I published it as a book in 1985. I was thirty-six then. A period when all sorts of things forged ahead on their own.
As the years passed by, though, and as I gained more experience as a writer and grew older, I couldn’t help but think that I hadn’t seen this unfinished, or perhaps immature, work, The City, and Its Uncertain Walls, through to its conclusion. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was one response to the original story, but I thought a different form of response might be worth doing, too. Not overwriting the earlier work but instead creating a story that coexisted with it, so that the two complemented each other.
Yet a vision of what form that other response would take still eluded me.
At the beginning of 2020, at long last I felt I might be able to rework The City, and Its Uncertain Walls. It was exactly forty years since I’d published it. In the interim I’d gone from age thirty-one to seventy-one. In many ways there’s a major difference between a novice writer holding down two jobs and an experienced professional writer (though I find it embarrassing to say so). But when it comes to the natural affection one has for the act of writing novels there shouldn’t be much of a difference.
One other thing to add is that 2020 was the Year of the Coronavirus. I started writing this novel in March 2020, just as the coronavirus began its rampage across Japan, and finished it nearly three years later. In the interim I rarely set foot outside my home, and avoided any lengthy trips, and in that weird and tension-inducing situation (with a fairly long pause or cooling-off period in between) I worked steadily, day after day, on this novel (like the Dream Reader reading old dreams in the library). Those circumstance might be significant. Or maybe not. But I think they must mean something. I feel it in my bones.
I finished Part One first, and felt I’d completed the task I’d set out to accomplish. To make sure, though, I let the manuscript ferment for half a year, during which I realized this wasn’t enough, that the story needed to go on, so I started writing Parts Two and Three. That’s why it took an unexpectedly long time to complete.
In any case, I’ve rewritten (or perhaps completed) The City and Its Uncertain Walls in a fresh form, and honestly, I feel relieved. For so long this work had felt like a small fish bone caught in my throat, something that bothered me.
For me—both as a writer and as a person—this little bone was very significant. Rewriting the work for the first time in some forty years, and stopping by that town again, made me acutely aware of this.
As Jorge Luis Borges put it, there are basically a limited number of stories one writer can seriously relate in his lifetime. All we do—I think it’s fair to say—is take that limited palette of motifs, change the approach and methods as we go, and rewrite them in all sorts of ways.
Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change and movement. Isn’t this the quintessential core of what stories are all about? At least that’s how I see it.
Haruki Murakami
December 2022