Japanese writer Haruki Murakami says walls are increasingly built and dividing people and countries after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic fuelled fear and scepticism.
“With feelings of suspicion replacing mutual trust, walls are continually being erected around us,” Murakami said in late April at Wellesley College.
That speech, “Writing Fiction in the Time of Pandemic and War”, was released on Wednesday in The Shincho Monthly literary magazine published by Shinchosha Co.
“Everybody seems to be confronted with a choice — to hide behind the walls, preserving safety and the status quo or, knowing the risks, to emerge beyond the walls in search of a freer value system,” he said.Like the protagonist in his new novel.
“The City and Its Uncertain Walls” was released in April in Japan and an English translation is expected in 2024.The protagonist, as Murakami described, faces a tough choice between two worlds: an isolated walled city of tranquility with no desire or suffering, and the real world beyond the walls filled with pain and desire and contradictions. The novel is based on a story he wrote for a magazine soon after becoming a novelist but was never published in book form. He said he knew it had important ideas and put it aside because he wanted to rewrite it.Some 40 years later, he discovered “this tale fits perfectly with the age we live in now.”
Murakami started rewriting the book in March 2020, soon after COVID-19 began spreading around the world, and finished it two years later, as the war in Ukraine passed its one-year mark.