The City and Its Uncertain Walls Summary, Characters and Themes

Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a mesmerizing blend of surrealism, philosophy, and human longing, transporting readers into a world where reality and illusion intertwine. 

It follows a man haunted by the loss of a girl he once loved, leading him on a mysterious journey into a dreamlike walled city. There, shadows are severed, memories shift, and time seems to stand still. As he explores the enigmatic town, working as a librarian, he confronts deep questions about identity, love, and the nature of existence. With Murakami’s signature style, this novel is a poetic meditation on human connection and the elusive boundaries of selfhood.

Summary

The City and Its Uncertain Walls follows an unnamed protagonist whose life has been shaped by the loss of a girl he loved in his youth. She mysteriously vanished one day, leaving him with an unshakable sense of emptiness. 

As he grows older, his longing for her only intensifies, pulling him toward an enigmatic walled city that exists at the edges of reality—perhaps a figment of his mind, or perhaps an actual place. The novel follows his surreal journey between the real world and this strange, self-contained city, where time, identity, and memory begin to dissolve.

The walled city is governed by peculiar rules. Upon entry, individuals must surrender their shadows, which represent their memories, past identities, and ties to the outside world. 

The Gatekeeper, a stoic and omniscient figure, determines who may enter, ensuring that those inside are stripped of their previous selves. As the protagonist ventures deeper, he takes up the role of a librarian, discovering that the city holds a library where books do not contain words but rather store old dreams—fragments of forgotten lives that whisper secrets about the city’s past.

The protagonist soon encounters a young boy dressed in a Yellow Submarine parka, an eccentric and intelligent figure obsessed with deciphering maps and reading these “old dreams.” The boy seems to understand the walled city in ways that even its longest inhabitants do not. 

Their mentor-student relationship grows as they try to uncover the city’s mysteries together. Meanwhile, the protagonist also meets a woman who resembles the girl he lost—yet she, like everything in the city, remains elusive, existing as both real and unreal.

As time passes, the protagonist wrestles with the strange nature of the city. 

He begins to suspect that the boundaries between this world and his memories are fluid, that he himself might have once been an integral part of the city’s very fabric. He recalls fragments of a past life—was he one of the city’s original inhabitants? 

Had he, at some point, severed his own shadow and forgotten his origins? These questions deepen the novel’s themes of existential uncertainty.

Throughout the story, Murakami weaves between past and present, blurring the protagonist’s waking life with his subconscious fears and desires. 

The walled city becomes both a literal and metaphorical space: a place of isolation and introspection, where one must choose between knowing oneself fully and surrendering to oblivion. 

The protagonist’s struggle reflects the universal human condition—the tension between clinging to the past and embracing the unknown.

Eventually, he discovers that the young boy, too, has found his way into the city independently, guided by his ability to understand old dreams. Their philosophical conversations about reality, memory, and identity form the core of the novel’s introspective nature. 

The protagonist must now make a choice: does he remain within the city, allowing his past self to fade completely, or does he return to the real world and live with the uncertainty of what the city truly was?

In the final chapters, he searches for an exit. The boy, however, chooses to stay, believing the city to be a paradise of knowledge and detachment. The Gatekeeper then reveals a startling truth: the protagonist was once part of the city’s creation. He had been here before, lost his memories, and returned—perhaps many times. 

Now, he must decide whether to leave once again, knowing that doing so will erase any proof of the city’s existence from his conscious mind.

The novel ends ambiguously, leaving the reader to wonder whether the city ever truly existed or was merely a projection of the protagonist’s psyche. Did he create it as a means of coping with his loss? 

Or does the city, with its severed shadows and stored dreams, exist beyond human perception?

With Murakami’s signature blend of magical realism and deep philosophical inquiry, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a haunting exploration of memory, solitude, and the thin line between reality and imagination. The story leaves readers suspended in its dreamlike world, pondering the uncertain walls that define our own existence.

Characters

The Protagonist (The Librarian)

The protagonist of The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a reflective and deeply introspective figure, caught in the liminal space between reality and illusion. He is a man on a quest, driven by a desire to rediscover a lost love and a quest for deeper self-understanding.

Throughout the novel, his sense of identity remains fluid, as his memories of the girl he loved and his growing connection to the enigmatic city blur the lines between his past and present. As a librarian, his occupation symbolizes his role as both a keeper of knowledge and a seeker of truths, whether they are about the world or his own consciousness.

The librarian’s struggle is existential, and as the narrative progresses, his exploration of the walled city becomes a metaphor for his internal journey. His search for the girl who disappeared and his subsequent immersion into the city reflect his yearning for lost parts of himself, ultimately leading him toward confronting difficult truths about existence, memory, and the self.

The Boy in the Yellow Submarine Parka

The mysterious boy who wears the Yellow Submarine parka acts as both a guide and a puzzle for the protagonist. He seems to possess an uncanny wisdom and knowledge of the city, its hidden passages, and its eerie phenomena.

His obsession with books and maps of the city suggests a deeper understanding of its metaphysical qualities, and his ability to read “old dreams” aligns with the idea that the city itself is a place of memory and collective consciousness. The boy’s relationship with the librarian evolves into that of mentor and mentee, though it is unclear whether the boy’s guidance is leading the librarian toward a greater understanding of reality or deeper into the illusion of the city.

The boy, in many ways, represents the untapped potential for insight into the city’s mysteries, but his motives and the full extent of his knowledge remain ambiguous. This reflects the novel’s overall theme of uncertainty and mystery.

The Lost Love

The girl from the librarian’s past, whose disappearance sets the protagonist on his quest, is not as physically present in the narrative but serves as an ethereal, almost mythical figure whose absence shapes much of the story. Her relationship with the librarian represents a lost connection, one that remains fixed in his memory and continues to haunt him.

The girl’s significance lies in the fact that she represents both the past and the librarian’s lost sense of self. Her disappearance triggers his journey toward understanding the nature of the city. In a way, she is both a literal and metaphorical key to unlocking the mysteries of the city, as the search for her becomes intertwined with the protagonist’s search for meaning in a world that seems to shift and distort around him.

The unresolved nature of her absence underscores the novel’s exploration of longing, nostalgia, and the fragility of human relationships.

The Gatekeeper

The Gatekeeper of the walled city is a symbolic figure, embodying the concept of control over entry and exclusion, as well as the intersection between the tangible and the intangible. As the person who determines who can enter the city, he serves as a threshold guardian, a gate between different worlds.

His role is not only to regulate access but also to test the worthiness of the individuals seeking to enter the city, particularly those whose shadows have been severed. The idea that only those without shadows may enter the city suggests that the Gatekeeper’s power is linked to the essence of identity and existence.

He is a central figure in the protagonist’s journey, acting as a figure of authority and mystery whose actions continuously raise questions about the boundaries between reality and illusion.

Themes

The Porous Boundaries Between Reality, Memory, and Illusion in the Human Psyche

One of the most compelling themes in The City and Its Uncertain Walls is the exploration of the porous boundaries that separate reality, memory, and illusion. The city, with its strange rules and unrecognizable inhabitants, serves as a physical manifestation of the human mind’s struggle to differentiate between past and present, truth and fantasy.

The protagonist’s fractured memories, his obsession with his lost love, and his journey through the city symbolize the fragility of identity and the complexities of memory. The city’s walls, which separate the real world from this dreamlike realm, reflect the internal walls the protagonist erects to protect himself from the trauma of loss and disillusionment.

As the boundaries between these realms become increasingly indistinguishable, the reader is left to question whether the city is an actual place or a construct of the protagonist’s subconscious. This represents his attempt to reconcile with the unresolved aspects of his life and identity.

The Solitude of the Individual and the Inescapable Search for Connection in an Uncertain World

Another central theme in the novel is the exploration of human isolation and the inherent longing for connection. The protagonist’s search for the girl he lost is not merely a search for a person but for a deeper understanding of himself and his place in the world.

The city, with its eerie atmosphere and strange inhabitants, becomes a symbol of the isolation that individuals often experience in a world that is increasingly difficult to navigate. As the librarian journeys deeper into the city, his encounters with various figures, such as the boy and the woman who resembles his lost love, highlight the duality of human existence—on one hand, a desire for connection and, on the other, a profound sense of aloneness.

The theme of solitude is explored not just as a physical condition but as an existential reality, where human beings are separated from each other by the walls of their own experiences, memories, and fears.

The Fragility and Impermanence of Human Relationships in the Face of Time’s Relentless Passage

Murakami uses the city’s shifting, dreamlike nature to examine the fragility of human connections and the fleeting nature of love and companionship. The librarian’s memories of the girl from his past are distorted and fragmented by time, mirroring the way in which human relationships can be shaped and reshaped by time’s passage.

The uncertainty surrounding the girl’s disappearance and the way her memory haunts the librarian reflect how relationships are often left unresolved, their true meanings buried beneath layers of time and experience. In the city, where time seems to lose its fixed structure, the protagonist’s quest for his lost love becomes a meditation on the impermanence of human bonds and the inevitability of separation.

This theme speaks to the painful realization that people, relationships, and emotions are often transient, slipping away like shadows that cannot be held onto, no matter how hard one tries.

The Concept of Identity as a Fluid and Shifting Entity in the Absence of Clear Boundaries

One of the most profound and complex themes in The City and Its Uncertain Walls is the exploration of identity as something mutable and undefined. The severing of shadows in the city is a metaphor for the loss of the self, suggesting that the boundaries that define an individual are not fixed but can be altered, even erased.

The librarian’s journey is one of self-discovery, as he grapples with his fragmented memories and the dissonance between who he was and who he has become. This theme challenges the notion of a stable, unchanging identity, suggesting instead that the self is an ever-evolving entity, shaped by experiences, relationships, and the fluid nature of time and space.

In the walled city, where reality itself is in constant flux, the protagonist must confront the possibility that his identity is not something he can reclaim or define but something that continuously shifts and transforms in response to the forces of memory, desire, and existential uncertainty.