City and Uncertain Walls

After seven years,
Haruki Murakami's highly anticipated new full-length novel!
A long-buried story begins to unfold once again,
drawing you into Haruki Murakami's serene and profound secret world.

How desperately I wanted to enter that city,
to go there and meet the real you...

On a summer evening, the sixteen-year-old you told the seventeen-year-old me a story about a city, a city completely enclosed by high walls, with only one gate, guarded by a stubborn gatekeeper. There, you neither dream nor cry. Yet, the you who lives there is the real you; the you here and now is merely a stand-in.
Because I truly longed to see you, I decided to set off to find you, working in the library there. It was a library with no books, only "old dreams" lined up on the shelves, and I was assigned the task of being a "dream reader," responsible for reading these old dreams.
The city and its walls, the mysterious library, egg-shaped old dreams, and you... In this novel, Haruki Murakami once again constructs a perfectly concluded, peculiar story, drawing you into a serene and profound secret world.

│You just have to want to go.
But to truly wish from the bottom of your heart is not so simple.
It might take some time, and during that time, you might have to give up many things.
Things that are very important to you.
Yet do not give up. For no matter how much time it takes, the city will not disappear.

I began writing this work in early March when the COVID-19 pandemic began to erupt fiercely in Japan, and it took me nearly three years to complete. During that time, I hardly went out, nor did I travel long distances. I continued writing this novel every day under those rather unusual and tense circumstances (almost like a "dream reader" reading "old dreams" in a library). Perhaps that situation meant something, or perhaps it meant nothing at all. But it must have meant something. I feel this deeply.
--Haruki Murakami