The City and Its Uncertain Walls

　　時隔七年，
　　期待已久的村上春樹最新長篇小說！
　　塵封已久的故事再次開始述說，
　　帶你進入村上春樹沉靜深邃的祕密世界

　　我多麼強烈地想要進到那座城，
　　想去那裡見真正的妳……

　　夏天的黃昏，十六歲的妳對十七歲的我說起那座城的故事，城被高牆團團圍住，牆只有一個門，由一個頑強的守門人守護著。在那裡的妳既不作夢，也不流淚。然而，住在那裡的妳才是真正的妳，此時此地的妳只是像替身那樣的存在。

　　因為我真的非常想見妳，便決定出發去那裡尋找在圖書館工作的妳。這是個一本書也沒有的圖書館，架子上排列的只有「古夢」，而我在這個圖書館被賦予了「夢讀」這樣的任務，也就是負責閱讀古夢。

　　城與牆、神祕圖書館、蛋形的古夢，還有妳……村上春樹在這部小說中，再次構造出了一個完好終結的奇異故事，帶你進入一個沉靜深邃的祕密世界。
　
　　│只要想去就行了。
　　不過發自內心地期望，並不是那麼簡單的事。
　　可能需要花一些時間，在那段期間可能必須拋棄各種東西。
　　對你來說，很重要的東西噢。
　　然而不要放棄。因為無論要花多少時間，城都不會消失。

　　我在疫情在日本開始猛烈爆發的三月初，正好開始寫這部作品，花了將近三年時間完成。在那之間幾乎沒有外出，也沒有長期旅行，我就在那相當異樣，而且頗為緊繃的環境之下，每天持續寫著這部小說（簡直像「夢讀」在圖書館讀「古夢」那樣）。那樣的狀況可能意味著什麼，或者什麼也不意味。不過應該有意味著什麼吧。我對此有深刻的體會。--村上春樹

　　本書中文版由時報出版

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.

＂Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction.＂ --The New York Times - ＂More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world.＂ --San Francisco Chronicle - ＂Murakami is masterful.＂ --Los Angeles Times

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world - a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.

＂Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn’t this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?＂ --Haruki Murakami, from the afterword

HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and one of the most recent of his many international honors is the Cino Del Duca World Prize, whose previous recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Ismail Kadare, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Joyce Carol Oates.