The City and its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

 Murakami remains my favorite writer of all time, however the last couple of books have been lower quality and this last one has been a chore to read through.  Still, good, but highly unreadable, especially compared to his masterpiece "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle".  

The book comes in three parts and the first part is the most unreadable as it is written in second person.  Murakami often writes in first person and sometimes in third person, but never before in second person.  One gets tired from "You did this, you wrote this, you said this...". The first part is about when the narrator was in high school, 17 years old, and met a girl, 16, at an essay competition and fell in love with her (and she with him).  They write very long letters to each other and are together, except for sex, as the girl tells him her real self is in a walled city far away from here.  Eventually the girl disappears and the author is devastated.

In the second part the narrator is 45, had some middling career in book trade, but never formed a family and is still brooding over the 16 year old girl from high school.  He quits his job in Tokyo, moves to the sticks and boonies of Fukushima prefecture.  There he becomes the head librarian and is coached by the ghost of the previous head librarian, Mr. Koyasu, who died a year before the narrator arrived.  Here he also meets a 16 year old boy who read voraciously and never talks to anyone except to ask them their birthday. Mr. Koyasu used to be the boy's mentor and the narrator tries to become his substitute.  The boy reveals that he knows about the City with the Uncertain Walls and wants the narrator to take him there, but he doesn't know how. 

In the third part the boy dies in the real world and his wooden corpse is discovered by the narrator in a dream in a dark closet in a mountain cabin and the narrator goes back to the City with the Uncertain Walls, which his real self never left, but only his shadow, and here he decides to leave and leave the boy, who inhabits his body, to be the Dream Reader.

Very allegoric and parabolic book with thoughts on life, youth, love, identity, self, shadow (in Jungian sense).  However, it seems to follow a Murakamian formula of dream self, split identity, non-identification with reality, etc.  These topics have already been espoused on in previous Murakami books to a great extent, so this one seems superfluous.  It is very voluminous, with not much to say, yet not like the other "slice of life" Murakami books - it is not easy to read and it doesn't flow easily.  

Murakami is still my favorite author, and it is nigh time he gets the Nobel prize in literature, but this book could have been better.