Haruki Murakami has a type. His central characters tend to be men on the cusp of middle age. They might listen to the Dave Brubeck Quartet or Charlie Parker. They probably eat spaghetti. It’s almost certain they live in a world in which ‘reality’ is shaky ground, as indicated by the presence of a talkative feline. While the cats in Murakami’s new novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, don’t engage in conversation, the unnamed narrator is cast from the global bestseller’s familiar mould. He cooks more than one simple but meticulously described pasta dish, loves jazz (though also listens to classical music) and is nostalgic for his youth.

In the first of three parts, the narrator describes his seventeen-year-old self meeting and falling in love with a sixteen-year-old girl ‘whose chest was swelling out beautifully’. The two begin an epistolary relationship. ‘I want to be yours,’ she tells him, ‘Completely, totally yours.’ But something prevents the teenagers from actually having sex (although the narrator certainly thinks about it). Eventually, the girl explains that she is just a shadow. Her ‘real self’ lives in a fantastical town surrounded by a high wall. The two spend hours talking about this town – its quirks, its dangers, its meandering river. In roughly alternating chapters, we follow the developing romance and watch him enter this mythical town many years later. When he finally reaches the place about which he has heard so much, he is forty-one. His beloved is still sixteen. Even worse, she has no memory of him whatsoever.

This must be especially galling for the narrator, given the ordeal he went through to gain entry. He had to submit to someone known as the Gatekeeper wounding his eyes and cutting off his shadow before he was able to enter. Aside from separating rare new residents from their shadows