There is something inescapably adolescent about the novels of Haruki Murakami. This is most obvious, perhaps, in his multimillion-selling Norwegian Wood, with its angst and melancholy. But it’s also there in the rest of his writing, whether in the mooning after lost loves (see 1Q84, Sputnik Sweetheart, South of the Border, West of the Sun) or the dreamlike, pseudo-spiritualism of novels such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. “Tell a dream, lose a reader,” Henry James said, and he wasn’t wrong.
The problem with Murakami’s dreamscapes are that they are so entirely unmoored from reality that nothing seems to matter; meaning is endlessly deferred. It feels as if his work, with its talking cats, mystical landscapes and drifting, nameless, middle-aged protagonists obsessed with their teenage years, has never moved on from a form of magical realism that was just about bearable in his short early novels. His books have not evolved – they have just got longer.
There is a sense of relief, at least, that The City and its Uncertain Walls, Murakami’s 15th novel, is several hundred pages shorter in English than it is in its Japanese original. More worryingly for those of us hoping that he might break new ground, it is presented as a companion piece to his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. And it is explicitly the rewriting of an early short story of the same name. For a writer often accused – even by his fans – of repetition, the signs are not good. Murakami is now 75, but there is something almost pathological in the way his writing refuses to move on. Where the thirtysomething Murakami writing about teen sex was just about acceptable, there is real ick when his narrator encounters “a 16-year-old girl whose chest was swelling out beautifully, and put his arms around her lithe young body” or speaks of the “explicit dreams” he has in which he ends “up soiling my sheets”.
The novel, like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, operates in two distinct spheres, one more or less realistic, the other fantastical. We understand that the unnamed narrator, Boku (one of the ways of indicating the first person in Japanese), has been unable to recover from the disappearance of his childhood sweetheart and so has gone looking for her in the mystical town where she works in a library as a reader of dreams. She is unable to recognise him in this world and, worryingly, she is still 16 (he’s now middle-aged). This is not the only problem: there are grumpy unicorns roaming the streets, a Gatekeeper who wishes to separate people from their shadows, walls that realign themselves to contain the population.
There is little here that passes for plot – dei ex machina abound in the form of ghosts who crop up to deliver important pieces of information to the reader. There is an endless central section set in a library in the “real” world in which Boku befriends a lonely adolescent. Then we return to the unicorns. Murakami’s work is often described as fantasy, but there is none of the intricate world-building that we find in the classics of that genre. Bad magical realism lacks both magic and realism, and The City and its Uncertain Walls should take its place alongside Coelho’s The Alchemist, Fowles’s The Magus, Gibran’s The Prophet and any number of other books that you can just about be forgiven for admiring as a teenager but which, to an adult reader, offer little more than embarrassment.
• The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami is published by Harvill Secker (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
