Haruki Murakami’s novels are, amongst other things, musical journeys. From the frantic, fitting, and recurring “Sinfonietta” by Leoš Janáček in 1Q84 (2009) to the thematic weight of “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles in Murakami’s 1987 novel of the same name, music allows him to add depth to characters and greater dimensionality to the worlds he creates. In this process, he exposes his readers to mercurial realms of fiction and mysterious powers on this side of reality. He approaches music like a film director, creating a soundtrack.
Indeed, the Internet abounds with playlists dedicated to Haruki Murakami’s novels. As a former jazz club proprietor and lifelong music lover (In 2011, he estimated that he had approximately 10,000 records), Murakami has a highly developed musical point of view. Still, his musical references seem to reflect the characters and settings of his work more than his personal preferences. The prodigious use of music is nothing new for Murakami, but in his most recent novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, music functions in a particularly pointed manner; its presence and absence are central features of the concrete and metaphysical spaces the characters migrate between.
Like many of his novels, he oscillates between worlds in The City and Its Uncertain Walls, between the real and unreal, subverting our expectations and ultimately blurring any lines we might think exist. In part one, we are introduced to a city with uncertain walls, a town where people exist without shadows and without the troubling emotional complexity that shadows seem to carry. It is a place where time has no meaning, clocks have no hands, and other than the changing seasons, each day is like the one before. Like the absence of shadows and time, it is similarly devoid of music.
However, when we arrive at part two, we are firmly (or as firmly as Murakami ever gets) in the real world, a world of shadows, time, and music. Most of the music we “hear” is heard in a local (nameless) coffee shop, “on the door, it just said COFFEE SHOP.” The owner, a woman in her mid-30s, is not a jazz aficionado. She simply “plays a jazz channel”, but our nameless protagonist can identify almost every song that plays during his frequent visits.
There is The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s 1967 version of Cole Porter’s song “Just One of Those Things” from the 1935 musical Jubilee. It plays when he first enters the coffee shop, although it takes him several pages to remember the name of the composition. When he returns, “Star Eyes” is playing “a neat piano trio performance”, though he is not sure who the pianist is (perhaps McCoy Tyner?). When he returns to the coffee shop once more, he hears the Dave Brubeck Quartet with Paul Desmond on alto sax. This time, they are playing their 1952 version of Fred Coots’ 1938 song, “You Go to My Head“. This is a fitting tune as it sparks the protagonist’s first proper conversation with the coffee shop owner, who will later play a prominent romantic role in the story.
At this point in his life, our protagonist is the head librarian at a small local library in the basin of a mountainous region of Fukushima. He listens to the classical station while he reads and cleans at home. He hears Antonio Vivaldi’s Viola d’amore Concertos and learns that the composer, born in 1678, was celebrated during his life but was soon forgotten and remained so until the 1950s when his magnum opus, The Four Seasons, was recorded at Carnegie Hall (It was actually recorded in 1947).
On another night, before a date with the coffee shop owner, our protagonist hears a string quartet playing Aleksandr Borodin and learns that in his life, Borodin was better known for and respected as a chemist than a composer, which leads the protagonist to wonder if “there was an element of chemistry” in the music. He then begins to fixate on the Russian Five, of which Borodin was a member. He remembers Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov but is bothered that he can’t remember the other two composers. During his date, he asks the coffee shop owner if she knows the other two; she laughs and proposes Tchaikovsky, to which our protagonist replies, “No, he isn’t. They formed in opposition to the Western-style music that Tchaikovsky composed.” Then, with their fingers intertwined, he recalls Mily Balakirev. He never remembers César Cui.
The most consequential musical reference comes in the form of The Yellow Submarine Boy, a 16-year-old savant who, instead of going to school, goes to the library, our protagonist’s place of work, every day and devours books. The boy, with many eccentricities, nearly always wears a parka with a picture of a Yellow Submarine from the Beatles’ 1968 animated movie Yellow Submarine. He also happens to don “the kind of round, metal-frame glasses John Lennon used to wear.”
On the occasional day that the parka is washed, the boy is forced to where his backup parka, which features an image of Jeremy Hillary Boob, PhD, a character from the same Beatles movie. Inspired by the boy’s attire, the protagonist attempts to rewatch Yellow Submarine, but when he goes to the local video store, the only Beatles movies they have in stock are A Hard Days Night and Help!. When this preternaturally gifted and strange boy expresses interest in going to the city with uncertain walls, a world the protagonist knows to be fundamentally dystopian, he reflects that “for [The Yellow Submarine Boy] this would be ‘Pepperland.’”
The City and Its Uncertain Walls: Spotify Playlist