“In the back of my throat was a small hard lump of air that I couldn’t get rid of. Every time I tried to swallow something, it irritated me a bit,” says the narrator toward the end of Haruki Murakami’s “The City and Its Uncertain Walls.” This feeling of something lodged — not for the duration of a meal, but over a lifetime — is itself the fish bone in the windpipe of the author’s latest novel.
After a 45-year career of nearly 20 novels and a handful of nonfiction books, it’s clear that Murakami can’t let some things go. The narrators in his fiction like jazz, women, whiskey and falling down real and symbolic rabbit holes into worlds filled with inscrutable rules. But “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” newly translated into English, is not just vaguely familiar, it’s an explicit rerun, albeit with an alternate ending.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel. 464 pages, KNOPF, Fiction.