Essay prompts The City and Its Uncertain Walls Haruki Murakami

12 Analytical Essay Prompts for The City and Its Uncertain Walls

This page offers 12 analytical essay prompts for Haruki Murakami’s 2024 novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. Each prompt targets a specific narrative device or theme, provides a defensible thesis direction, and lists key evidence leads drawn directly from the text. Use these prompts to explore character change, causality, relationships, contrasting scenes, themes, symbols, structure, foreshadowing, and the novel’s ending.

Prompt 1: The Narrator’s Shifting Relationship with Memory and Choice

Why this prompt matters: The narrator spends decades oscillating between two worlds, and his struggle to commit to either reveals how identity is shaped by the stories we choose to remember.

Sample thesis direction: The narrator’s inability to fully embrace either the walled town or the real world demonstrates that identity is not a fixed destination but a dynamic negotiation between competing desires and memories.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 25: The narrator escapes the wall by trusting his shadow’s claim that the wall is an illusion; the wall laughs, insisting it will always be there.
Chapter 26: The narrator tells his shadow he will stay because the outside world offers only deeper loneliness.
Chapter 28: After returning, he feels his memories of the town are more real than his actual life, speculating that another version of himself remains there.
Chapter 69: He senses it is time to leave the town, but hesitates, asking for time to think before the candle goes out.

Prompt 2: Causality and the Co-Creation of the Walled Town

Why this prompt matters: The walled town is built jointly by the narrator and the girl through conversation and letters. This raises questions about how collaborative storytelling can create a reality that outlives its creators.

Sample thesis direction: The walled town functions as a shared metaphor for emotional intimacy, but its eventual independence from the narrator and the girl demonstrates that imaginative constructs can take on lives of their own, escaping the control of their authors.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 2: The narrator and the girl meet at a botanical garden café; he writes down her descriptions of the town in a special notebook, acting as her scribe.
Chapter 3: The narrator learns details about the town’s beasts and seasons solely through her telling.
Chapter 15: The girl describes the wall as twenty-six feet high, with no shadows for humans, and he writes it all down; she reveals her real self lives there working in the library.
Chapter 16: After her letters stop, the narrator realizes he has no way to verify the town’s existence beyond the notebook.

Prompt 3: Silence and Withheld Intimacy in the Central Relationship

Why this prompt matters: The narrator and the girl never have full physical intimacy, and the same pattern recurs later with the coffee shop woman. This repeated deferral reveals Murakami’s treatment of love as a state of patient waiting.

Sample thesis direction: Murakami uses the motif of physical separation to argue that true connection requires willing suspension of bodily desire in favor of emotional trust, and that this patient waiting is itself a form of love.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 13: The girl explains her “rigid heart,” an emotional paralysis, and asks him to wait because her heart and body are not aligned.
Chapter 11: A seventeen-year-old boy (the narrator) holds his girlfriend while she cries voicelessly; he feels inadequate because of his youth.
Chapter 8: Their first kiss occurs during a game of shadow tag; he keeps her white handkerchief as a memory.
Chapter 61: The coffee shop woman wears a “bodysuit of armor” against hypothetical threats; the narrator agrees to wait, uncertain how long.

Prompt 4: Water as a Threshold Between Worlds

Why this prompt matters: Rivers, pools, and whirlpools appear at pivotal moments of transition, suggesting that water is a permeable boundary where memory, identity, and reality dissolve.

Sample thesis direction: Water functions not as a symbol of purity but as a liminal space where the boundaries between the walled town and the real world become pliable, allowing characters to move between states of being.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 1: The narrator and the girl walk barefoot along a river; she first tells him about the walled town.
Chapter 17: The southern pool contains a dangerous whirlpool; the shadow insists the pool stories are fabricated.
Chapter 26: The narrator carries his shadow to the pool, the only exit, but chooses to let the shadow escape alone.
Chapter 62: In a dream, the narrator walks upstream as a middle-aged man but regresses to seventeen while retaining adult memories; he meets the girl and notices he has no shadow.

Prompt 5: Parallel Structures of Isolation in the Walled Town and the Z** Library

Why this prompt matters: Both settings are enclosed, rule-bound communities that shelter outcasts. Comparing them illuminates the novel’s central tension between retreat and connection.

Sample thesis direction: Both the walled town and the rural library are constructed sanctuaries that shelter misfits, yet each exacts a price: the loss of one’s shadow in the town, or the acceptance of ghostly companionship in the library.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 31: The narrator moves to a remote mountain town to become head librarian; he walks along the river each morning and enjoys simplicity.
Chapter 34: First snowfall triggers memories of the walled town; Mr. Koyasu shows the narrator a hidden room with a woodstove identical to the one in the town’s library.
Chapter 37: Mr. Koyasu reveals he is a ghost who died over a year ago; only the narrator and Mrs. Soeda can see him.
Chapter 51: Yellow Submarine Boy, alienated from his family, wants to leave this world for the walled town; the narrator concludes the boy has no place in this world.

Prompt 6: The Handless Clock as a Symbol of Stalled Time

Why this prompt matters: The clock without hands appears in the walled town and, later, on Mr. Koyasu’s wristwatch. It represents the suspension of linear time and the psychological paralysis of the characters.

Sample thesis direction: The handless clock symbolizes the suspension of linear time that is necessary for the walled town to exist, but it also signals the emotional and psychological paralysis that afflicts its inhabitants, including the narrator.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 2: The narrator recalls the clock tower in the walled town has no hands.
Chapter 6: The girl keeps a dream journal; the narrator cannot recall his dreams, suggesting a different experience of time.
Chapter 36: Mr. Koyasu’s antique wristwatch has no hands; the narrator notes the similarity to the clock tower.
Chapter 64: The narrator observes that the clock without hands shows “the meaninglessness of time”; he reflects that even the seasons pass at an unmeasured pace.

Prompt 7: The Novel’s Tripartite Structure and Fragmented Identity

Why this prompt matters: The book divides into three distinct sections—past memories, the walled town, and the Z** library—each with its own tone and rules. This structure mirrors the narrator’s fractured sense of self.

Sample thesis direction: Murakami’s division of the narrative into three discrete periods forces the reader to experience the narrator’s dissociation, arguing that identity is a mosaic of overlapping timelines rather than a single, coherent story.

Evidence leads:

Part One (chapters 1–4): The summer-long creation of the walled town through letters and meetings.
Part Two (chapters 5–26): The narrator’s time inside the walled town as Dream Reader, ending with his escape and return.
Part Three (chapters 27–70): His life in Z**, the discovery of Mr. Koyasu’s ghost, and the encounter with Yellow Submarine Boy.
Afterword: Murakami explains he wrote the novella in 1980, then rewrote it during the pandemic, adding Parts Two and Three—a structural choice that mirrors the narrator’s own pauses and returns.

Prompt 8: Forbidden Knowledge and Its Consequences

Why this prompt matters: Several characters encounter hidden truths that they wish they had not seen—from the old soldier’s ghostly vision to the narrator’s glimpse behind the wall. The novel suggests that some knowledge is too dangerous to possess.

Sample thesis direction: Every act of gaining insight into the hidden structure of reality—whether the wall’s true nature, the boy’s map, or the ghost’s secret—comes at the cost of innocence, and the novel implies that some truths are better left unexplored.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 13: The old man warns the narrator about seeing the right side of a ghostly woman; what he saw was “indescribably terrible” and exists inside everyone but must never be seen.
Chapter 44: Mr. Koyasu tells the narrator that his wife left two scallions as an unsolvable riddle; the narrator cannot decode the meaning.
Chapter 50: Yellow Submarine Boy’s map becomes a “visual hallucination machine,” summoning vivid memories of the walled town until the narrator can barely distinguish between worlds.
Chapter 66: The narrator merges with the boy by allowing him to bite his left earlobe; afterward, he hides the truth from the girl.

Prompt 9: The Refusal to Resolve the Ontological Status of the Walled Town

Why this prompt matters: The novel ends on a dream sequence that mirrors the opening, leaving the walled town’s reality ambiguous. This resistance to closure is a deliberate thematic choice.

Sample thesis direction: By ending on a liminal dream that echoes the novel’s first scene, Murakami insists that the city’s walls remain “uncertain” not because of inadequate description but because reality itself is a continuous oscillation between worlds.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 1: The narrator and the girl walk barefoot along a river; she describes the walled town as if it were real.
Chapter 62: In a dream, the narrator walks a river as a middle-aged man who regresses to seventeen; the girl whispers they are “someone else’s shadows.”
Chapter 63: He wakes abruptly, leaving the town’s status unresolved; the girl touches his ear and the pain vanishes.
Afterword: Murakami quotes Borges on the limited number of stories a writer can tell and says truth is “ceaseless change,” not fixed stillness.

Prompt 10: Yellow Submarine Boy’s Transformation from Passive Genius to Voluntary Exile

Why this prompt matters: The boy begins as a silent, withdrawn savant and ends by leaving his body to become the new Dream Reader. His arc raises questions about agency and belonging.

Sample thesis direction: The boy’s choice to abandon his physical self for the walled town illustrates that the town offers a form of belonging unavailable in his own family, redefining selfhood as a function of purposeful, chosen isolation.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 46: The boy has a photographic memory and can instantly tell the weekday of any birth date; he reads obsessively at the library.
Chapter 50: He draws a detailed map of the walled town without ever having seen it, based on the narrator’s murmured monologues.
Chapter 51: He declares he must go to the walled town to read old dreams forever, accepting that he may never return.
Chapter 66: He merges with the narrator by biting his left earlobe; afterward, the narrator feels his presence inside, reading dreams from within.

Prompt 11: The Lost Girl as an Absent Center Driving the Narrative

Why this prompt matters: The girl disappears early in the story, but her absence organizes the entire plot. The narrator’s search for her gives structure to his life, yet she remains unknowable.

Sample thesis direction: The girl’s disappearance is not a plot hole but a deliberate structural absence that motivates the narrator’s entire quest; her inaccessibility mirrors the ineffability of pure love itself.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 1: The girl warns that in the walled town her real self will not remember him—a prophecy that comes true.
Chapter 16: The narrator recalls that her letters stopped; he called her house and a man hung up.
Chapter 20: The narrator memorized her final letter while imagining her trapped on a sinking ship; afterward he wrote many letters but got no reply.
Chapter 44: Mr. Koyasu notes that the narrator’s heart is wounded by a love severed suddenly, comparing it to his own wife’s mysterious scallion riddle.

Prompt 12: The Shadow as a Physical Manifestation of the Self and Its Cost

Why this prompt matters: Shadows in this novel are not mere dark shapes—they are personified doubles that carry memory and identity. Sacrificing one’s shadow means surrendering a part of the self.

Sample thesis direction: In Murakami’s cosmology, the shadow is the authentic self that the walled town requires be sacrificed; the novel argues that any utopia built on such a loss is ultimately unsustainable.

Evidence leads:

Chapter 9: The narrator leaves his shadow with the Gatekeeper; the shadow appears weak and shabby; the Gatekeeper says the shadow contains the “dark heart.”
Chapter 15: The girl explains that in the walled town humans have no shadows; only the unicorns cast shadows.
Chapter 24: The narrator and his shadow pass through the wall as if through jelly; the wall laughs, saying it will always be there.
Chapter 27: After returning to the real world, the narrator feels like a heavy iron ball; he asks his silent shadow for direction but receives no answer.

For additional context, explore the related character pages and theme analyses. If you are looking for discussion questions, see our Questions and Answers page.