A labour of love Haruki Murakami revisits a hypnotic city of dreams and a tale of teen sweethearts, in material he's worked on over four decades

The elegiac quality of Haruki Murakami's new novel, his first in six years, was perhaps inevitable considering its origins. The City and Its Uncertain Walls began as an attempt to rework a 1980 story of the same title, originally published in the Japanese magazine Bungakukai, which Murakami, unsatisfied, never allowed to be republished or translated.

- AK Blakemore

"I felt that this work contained something vital for me," Murakami writes in the novel's afterword, "at the time, though, unfortunately I lacked the skills to convey what that something was." Five years later, his first attempt at a revision developed into the novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a narrative that ran "parallel" to the original - "like two crews digging a tunnel, one from each end, breaking through and meeting up in the exact middle". Yet still, Murakami writes, the story "bothered" him. And so 35 years later, as the Covid pandemic began, Murakami circled back to the material again, spending three years expanding it into this lengthy tripartite novel, now translated into English by Philip Gabriel.

Were his efforts rewarded, this third time around? For Murakami himself, it seems the answer is a resounding yes: he writes of his "relief" at bringing the material into a conclusive form. But as a reader, this protracted, foggy and self-referential novel feels scant in its rewards.