READERS GUIDE

The questions, discussion topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation of Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, a mind- and genre-bending novel that explores—and explodes—the limits of the human heart and imagination through the plight of one man searching for love, purpose, and belonging, within society and within himself.

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. Have you ever fallen in love the way the narrator and the girl do when they are teenagers? What do you remember about that time—how did it feel in your body and heart?

2. Even as a young man, the narrator possesses a degree of both self-control and self-awareness that continue to mature as he ages. How do these traits enable him to explore the city behind the wall, and later to leave the city? Do you think these traits limited his life experiences in any way?

3. What do you think the beasts represent in the imaginary city? Why are they sacrificed each season? What creatures would live in an imaginary city of your creation?

4. Discuss how the people of the city inside the wall experience time—or don’t. Besides the seasonal deaths of the unicorns, what events mark time? What does the timelessness of this place suggest about the imagination? Also consider the author’s reflections in the afterword on revising his own novel.

5. The characters describe several unusual and vivid dreams throughout the book—from the girl’s dream of being pregnant in a bathtub to the narrator’s dreams of the library and the blue beret, and of the boy biting his ears. Have you ever had similar dreams, where you couldn’t tell if they were real or not? Have any of your dreams ever come true, like how the narrator actually finds the library and the blue beret on Mr. Koyasu’s desk?

6. What qualities does the narrator possess that make him ideal for the role of Dream Reader? What is the nature of these preserved dreams, and why do they need to be read daily?

7. If you could talk with your shadow the way the narrator does in the book, what would yours say to you? Have you ever felt separated from this part of yourself, and if so, how did you reconnect?

8. Based on how shadows appear in this novel, what role do they play in our existence, our sense of self, and our ability to be whole, “real” people? How is this different from the way “shadows” are discussed in modern psychology? Consider what the narrator thinks: “But if my shadow is lost forever, I get the feeling that something else very important will be lost too” (p. 95).

9. Inside and outside the wall, the narrator experiences different degrees of physical sensation (pain, lust, cold and other weather) and mental spaciousness and contentment (like the vast sea). Why do you think these two states can’t exist at the same time?

10. Which aspects of the city behind the wall appealed to you, and which aspects seemed less desirable? Consider elements like the lack of time, the hierarchy of residents, the rules of the Gatekeeper, the treatment of the shadows and the beasts, etc

11. Why do you think the narrator chose to not return to the world outside the wall with his shadow? Whose story resumes in Part Two?

12. How did the repetition of certain scenes and details throughout the novel contribute to the sense of reality and imagination blurring? What repeated details stood out to you as meaningful—as character traits for the narrator and/or as stylistic trademarks of the author?

13. What motivates the narrator to leave his job and seek a new life outside the city working in the library? How might you explain the reawakening of his spirit and desire for vitality and fulfillment?

14. Discuss the parallels between elements of the narrator’s “real world,” after he returns, versus the city behind the wall—Mr. Koyasu, the woman who owns the coffee shop, the Yellow Submarine Boy, the city of Z** itself. How could you tell if these were real or invented?

15. What about the narrator made him attractive to Mr. Koyasu’s ghost? How were their stories of heartbreak and disappointment similar?

16. The feeling of being inside a “hard shell” appears several times throughout the book—the narrator’s ability to connect with the girl, Mr. Koyasu (emerging from this shell after grieving his wife and son), the woman from the coffee shop’s restrictive undergarments. What do these restraints offer people by way of protection or limitation? Have you ever felt as if you were contained in such a way, physically or emotionally? If so, was it helpful or harmful?

17. Do you think the narrator was satisfied by his relationship with the woman who owned the coffee shop? Did he seem to lament not experiencing meaningful sexual intimacy with anyone in his life?

18. Mrs. Soeda explains that she conveyed Mr. Koyasu’s wishes to the town board “like a ventriloquist’s dummy who just moves his mouth and does what he’s told” (p. 242). Who else acts like a “ventriloquist” for the dead—or the non-real—in the novel? Have you ever felt like this in your life, speaking or acting on behalf of people no longer with us?

19. “A soul that’s lost a body vanishes in the end. . . . The soul is a transitory state and nothing more, but nothingness is eternal. No—it transcends the expression the eternal,” says Mr. Koyasu about becoming a ghost (p. 256). Do you think the narrator understood this idea from his own time behind the wall? What might that suggest about his soul and/or his shadow? What comfort does he receive from speaking to Mr. Koyasu’s soul when he visited the family’s grave?

20. What is intriguing, or perhaps even familiar, about the Yellow Submarine Boy when the narrator meets him? Consider how the girl had no emotions or “spirit” when he met her inside the wall. What might this suggest about the boy and his shadow in the real world?

21. How did the conversation between M**’s father and the narrator make you feel? Did the father’s words about trying to connect to his son (and failing) resonate with you?

22. Discuss the changes in both the narrator and Yellow Submarine Boy once they unite in the city behind the wall. How did they seem more “real,” or less “real,” even outside of what we might consider real or logical circumstances (e.g., the fact that the narrator seems to get younger when he returns to the city)?

23. M** tells the narrator that, inside the wall, “we’re floating in empty space. There’s nothing we can grab onto. But we haven’t fallen yet. In order to start falling, you need the flow of time. . . . We probably couldn’t find a way to prevent the fall. But there is a way to keep it from being fatal” (p. 434). What, or who, keeps the narrator’s fall from being fatal when he follows his heart and leaves the city? What do you think is waiting for him on the other side of the “darkness ever so soft” (p. 445)?  

24. Where do you think the narrator was able to be his “real” self—behind the wall or outside the wall?

25. What did the author’s afterword clarify about the nature of this novel for you as a reader? Did it change anything about the way you interpreted it? Consider his parting thought: “Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change and movement” (p. 449). What truths did the novel bring forth for inquiry through its instabilities?