Walls: The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami’s latest novel dramatizes a theory of the self that is sure to resonate with introverts.

Which would you consider “the real you”: the part that has private thoughts and feelings, shared only in journals, art or late-night conversation with intimates? Or the social being that flirts, bargains, consoles, jokes around, argues or reports to the boss? Many introverts straightaway say the former, and for those who lean that way, that answer can have a deep, instinctive hold on them.

I had this idea about “the real me” even as a teenager, I believe. When boys or men talked niceties with me for half an hour and said they liked me, I couldn’t understand. “But you don’t know me,” I’d protest, in my head or out loud – meaning, I hadn’t yet shared the inner me, my real self. What they saw, heard and liked was something not-me.

Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, develops the quintessence of the consciousness-as-me perspective as eloquently and creatively as I’ve ever encountered it. In the first part of the book, a sixteen-year-old girl confides to a seventeen-year-old boy that the real her lives in a town surrounded by a high wall. He is interacting with “only a stand-in, like a wandering shadow.” The boy finds this enchanting and pursues both the girl and the town where she exists boldly whole, a town that both is and isn’t a product of her imagination.