I have recently finished listening to Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls on Audible, largely while walking. This seems, in retrospect, to have been an unusually appropriate way to encounter the book.
Murakami’s novels often appear to require movement. His characters walk through cities, travel through unfamiliar landscapes, descend into strange psychological spaces, sit in libraries, pass through thresholds and find themselves inhabiting worlds whose relationship with ordinary reality is never entirely clear. Listening while walking produces something similar. The body moves through the external world while another landscape gradually establishes itself internally.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is particularly suited to this kind of encounter because it is, at its centre, a deeply psychological novel. Its mysterious city, its walls, its shadows, its library and its ambiguous relationship between waking life and dream can all be approached symbolically. They function less as pieces of a puzzle to be solved than as expressions of an interior condition.
Seen through a Jungian frame, the novel can be understood as an exploration of a divided psyche attempting to recover balance.
Thinking and Feeling as Psychological Functions
One of the most interesting aspects of this division concerns the relationship between thinking and feeling.
For Jung, feeling is not simply another word for emotion. Thinking and feeling are both rational functions, but they make judgements differently. Thinking asks about the nature, structure and truth of something. Feeling evaluates significance and value. It asks what something means within the pattern of a life, what relationship one has to it, and what psychological weight it carries.
This distinction becomes particularly illuminating when applied by Murakami.
The protagonist of The City and Its Uncertain Walls seems to inhabit a lived world in which the capacity for feeling has gradually been worn down. He remains capable of functioning. He can work, organise his life and interpret circumstances. He can think. Yet, there is a sense that something essential has withdrawn from ordinary existence.
Feeling has not disappeared altogether. Instead, it has found another home. It survives within the symbolic and imagined geography of the psyche.
The mysterious city therefore becomes more than an alternative world. It can be understood as the place in which something psychologically neglected has continued to exist. What cannot flourish within the protagonist’s ordinary life has retreated into the unconscious, where it reappears in transformed form.
This is characteristic of the Jungian psyche. What consciousness excludes does not simply vanish. It continues to operate elsewhere.
A psychological quality that cannot find expression through the dominant conscious personality may return through dreams, fantasies, symbols, compulsions and projections. The unconscious compensates for the one-sidedness of consciousness.
Murakami’s city can therefore be read as a compensatory landscape. Within it, feeling acquires substance. Memory has weight. Relationships are experienced through atmosphere and image rather than explanation. The distinction between the real and unreal matters less than the psychological truth contained in the experience.
The Japanese Aesthetic Context
This is also where the specifically Japanese literary and aesthetic context becomes important, although it needs to be described carefully. It would be too crude to suggest that Japanese culture simply privileges feeling over thinking. Murakami is himself a highly cosmopolitan writer, deeply influenced by European and American literature, jazz, classical music and popular culture. His psychological world cannot be reduced to a national character.
What is more useful is to notice that Japanese aesthetic traditions have developed sophisticated ways of treating indirectness, transience, absence and atmosphere as forms of meaning in their own right.
The idea of mono no aware, for example, concerns a sensitivity to impermanence and to the emotional resonance that arises because things pass away. Its force lies not in argument but in recognition. Something is understood through its fleetingness.
Likewise, ma refers to the significance of interval, spacing or emptiness. What is absent can structure experience as strongly as what is present. Silence, delay and separation are therefore not necessarily gaps waiting to be filled. They may themselves carry meaning.
And yūgen, in its broad aesthetic sense, points towards a depth that is suggested rather than exhaustively stated: something partially concealed, intimated through image, atmosphere or incompleteness.
Murakami should not simply be placed inside these traditions as though he were illustrating them consciously. His fiction is too hybrid and idiosyncratic for that. But these ideas provide a more precise vocabulary for understanding why his symbolic worlds often resist being translated immediately into conceptual explanation.
The feeling function, in Jung’s sense, operates well within this territory. It can register significance before explanation has been completed. An image can matter without first being decoded. A relationship can possess value even when its structure remains uncertain. A loss can organise an entire life without ever becoming fully comprehensible.
This is rather different from saying that feeling is opposed to rationality. Jung did not regard feeling as irrational. Feeling makes judgements. It discriminates. It establishes value.
What Murakami repeatedly resists is not thinking itself, but the assumption that psychological reality becomes valid only after it has been translated into explicit conceptual terms.
His fiction often asks us to remain with an image before explaining it. A wall can remain a wall. A shadow can remain a shadow. A library can possess psychological significance without becoming an allegory with a single correct interpretation.
The Yellow Submarine Boy and the Opposite That Must Be Redeemed
This is particularly important in The City and Its Uncertain Walls, because the protagonist’s difficulty is not simply that he feels too much or too little. Rather, thinking and feeling have ceased to communicate properly.
Feeling has withdrawn from everyday consciousness and established itself elsewhere, so the imagined city becomes the place where emotional and relational significance survives.
From a Jungian perspective, this resembles a form of psychological dissociation between functions. The conscious personality continues operating, but something necessary for wholeness has migrated into another region of the psyche.
The task is therefore not to abandon the lived world and remain within imagination. Nor is it to dismiss the imagined world as unreal. The task is integration.
This is where the figure of the Yellow Submarine Boy becomes particularly interesting. He can be understood as an opposite pole within the psychological structure of the novel. If the protagonist represents a consciousness from which feeling has gradually retreated, the Yellow Submarine Boy appears to embody another form of imbalance.
He is associated with thinking, categorisation, pattern and cognitive intensity. His relationship with the world appears mediated by systems and intellectual absorption. Yet within a Jungian reading, such an opposite is not simply an antagonist.
It is something that must be redeemed. Jungian psychology repeatedly returns to the idea that psychological wholeness does not come through eliminating the opposite. It emerges by establishing a relationship with it.
The rejected or underdeveloped aspect of the personality frequently returns in apparently alien form. It may initially appear irritating, frightening, irrational or incomprehensible precisely because consciousness has not yet learnt how to accommodate it. The task is therefore not conquest but integration.
The Yellow Submarine Boy can be read in this sense as carrying part of the psychological material that the protagonist himself needs. If the protagonist must rediscover feeling, the boy must encounter something that thinking alone cannot provide. He must acquire some experience of empathy.
And significantly, this does not take place purely through rational explanation. It occurs through the dreamlike and unconscious dimensions of experience.
Dreams as a Meeting Place
Here Murakami moves close to one of the central propositions of depth psychology: consciousness cannot reason its way into wholeness.Some forms of psychological knowledge have to be experienced.
Dreams operate in precisely this territory. The dream does not usually argue a case. It dramatises a situation. It presents images, relationships, reversals, dangers and possibilities. It allows something excluded from conscious life to appear symbolically.
The dream therefore becomes a meeting place between psychological opposites. Thinking encounters images that cannot immediately be reduced to logic. Feeling encounters forms that can gradually be brought into consciousness and reflected upon.
Neither remains unchanged.
From this perspective, the strange architecture of The City and Its Uncertain Walls begins to look less like surrealism for its own sake and more like a model of psychic development. The city, the walls, the shadows and the dream-world are elements of an interior geography through which the protagonist has to move.
The Uncertain Wall and Individuation
The uncertain wall is particularly suggestive. A wall marks a distinction. It divides one territory from another. Psychologically, it may represent the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness, between the personality we inhabit publicly and those aspects of ourselves that remain unrecognised.
But Murakami makes the wall uncertain. Its instability matters.
Individuation requires boundaries, but it also requires that those boundaries remain permeable enough for communication between different regions of the psyche.
If the wall becomes absolute, consciousness becomes isolated. If it disappears entirely, psychological differentiation becomes impossible. The task is therefore not simply to destroy the wall but to discover how to cross it.
This process resembles Jung’s understanding of individuation. Individuation is sometimes presented too simplistically as self-discovery, as though somewhere inside us there were a complete and authentic personality waiting to be uncovered.
Jung’s conception is more difficult.
The Self is not simply the conscious ego enlarged. It represents a broader psychological totality within which conscious and unconscious tendencies have to establish a relationship. Growth therefore frequently involves encounters with what appears to be alien.
The shadow is perhaps the most familiar example. It contains qualities that the conscious personality has excluded or failed to develop. But the encounter with the unconscious does not end with the shadow. The psyche continually presents consciousness with perspectives that complicate its preferred understanding of itself.
Murakami’s protagonist appears to move through precisely this process. He cannot recover simply by returning to an earlier emotional state. Nor can he remain indefinitely within the symbolic refuge in which feeling has been preserved. Something has to be carried between the worlds. Feeling must return to lived experience. Thinking must become capable of receiving what emerges from the unconscious without immediately reducing it to explanation.
Balance Rather Than Victory
The goal is therefore psychological balance. Not perfect equilibrium, because Jung rarely describes psychological life in such static terms. Rather, balance is achieved dynamically through continuing compensation between opposites.
Thinking checks feeling. Feeling humanises thinking. Consciousness gives form to unconscious experience. The unconscious reminds consciousness that its preferred categories are incomplete.
This is where Murakami’s apparently slow, repetitive style becomes important. I increasingly think of him as resembling an artisan baker. He seems to require a large amount of material before the final form can emerge. Characters, memories, records, meals, libraries, music, dreams, mysterious women, solitary routines, missing people and unexplained events are gradually worked together like dough.
Then the material has to be left. It has to prove.
Murakami rarely forces his symbols towards immediate resolution. He allows them to rise slowly within the imagination. Only afterwards does the reader begin to recognise the form that has been created.
That is also something like the way the psyche itself works. We may think we understand an experience while we are living through it, only to discover years later that its significance has changed. Dreams return. Memories reorganise themselves. Relationships acquire new meaning. Psychological understanding often arrives retrospectively.
Walking With Murakami
Listening to The City and Its Uncertain Walls while taking long walks amplified this quality. Walking creates a peculiar mental rhythm. Attention is occupied, but not completely. Thought loosens. Images circulate. Associations form without being forced.
There is something appropriately Murakamian about moving through an ordinary landscape while simultaneously inhabiting another psychological space. The miles accumulate almost unnoticed.
So do the images. By the time the walk is finished, one has travelled through more than one geography. Perhaps that is ultimately what I found most compelling about the novel. It is not primarily a story about choosing between reality and imagination, thinking and feeling, consciousness and dream. It is about learning to live in relationship with all of them.
The city cannot simply replace the ordinary world. The ordinary world cannot deny the psychological truths contained within the city. The thinking function cannot become the whole personality. Neither can feeling. Growth occurs through movement between them.
The psyche becomes more spacious when its different parts are permitted to encounter one another. Murakami’s uncertain walls therefore describe something recognisable about psychological life itself. We construct boundaries in order to function, but eventually some of those boundaries have to become crossings.
What has been lost must be encountered again. What has been rejected must sometimes be redeemed. And what consciousness cannot understand directly may first have to arrive as a dream.
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