New novel a shadow of Haruki Murakami's older, better works

The prose in The City And Its Uncertain Walls is so repetitive, it robs the phrases of any enchantment they might once have had

- Olivia Ho

THE CITY AND ITS UNCERTAIN WALLS By Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel Fiction/Alfred A. Knopf/Hardcover/ 452 pages/$49.60

Imagine a town surrounded by a high wall. It has one gate, guarded by a Gatekeeper. Unicorns live outside it.

The clock on the tower has no hands. The people in the town have no shadows, which have been cut off. In the town is a library with no books. Its shelves are filled instead with old dreams.

If you forget any of these details, do not worry. You are going to keep hearing about the town. Many, many times.

In fact, if you are a devoted reader of Haruki Murakami, that behemoth of Japanese fiction, you will already know this town. It first appeared in a novella titled The City, And Its Uncertain Walls that was published in a 1980 literary magazine, predating Murakami's debut novel A Wild Sheep Chase (1982).

It recurs in the double-stranded novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World (1985), which interweaves a cyberpunk thriller and a surreal fantasy set in the aforementioned town in a dialectic of consciousness.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World, as far as this reviewer is concerned, is Murakami at his best. In the English translation by Alfred Birnbaum, the End Of The World sequences are shot through with an aching luminosity.