Memory and Forgetting: The Fragile Architecture of the Past
The Thematic Claim: Forgetting as Architecture
In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami presents memory not as a private archive but as a contested terrain where forgetting is an active, structuring force. The walled town literally requires the erasure of personal history to function, yet memories persist in transformed forms—as old dreams stored in the library, as shadows that contain the expelled self, and as bodily traces that resist complete obliteration. The novel asks whether memory or forgetting offers a truer path to the self, and its answer is characteristically ambiguous: both are necessary, both are painful, and neither is complete.
Selective Memory Across Three Plot Lines
The Girl’s Forgetting in the Walled Town
The novel’s central relationship is founded on a memory that cannot survive crossing the wall. The girl explicitly warns the narrator that in the walled town, her real self will not remember him. This is not mere absence of memory but an active condition of the town’s existence. When the narrator enters the town and finds her working as a librarian, she regards him with the faintest flicker of recognition—small frown lines between her brows as if starting to remember something important—but the possibility never materializes; it is “sucked away and vanished.” This scene dramatizes forgetting as a force that operates in real time, not as a passive loss but as an active suppression.
The pathos of the narrator’s position is that he must choose to enter a world where the person he loves cannot know him. He carries the full weight of their shared past while she inhabits a present emptied of that history. His memory becomes a private burden, and the walled town becomes a space where love persists only as an asymmetrical condition—one person remembers, the other does not. The narrator-protagonist must live with this asymmetry every day.
The Shadow’s Theory of Expelled Memory
The narrator’s shadow offers the novel’s most explicit theory of how forgetting operates in the walled town. According to this account, the town exists by separating body and shadow, exiling the body outside the wall as something superfluous. But complete erasure is impossible: the tiniest remnants of mind—emotions like sadness, confusion, jealousy, fear, and love—remain as “seeds” that quietly grow inside the shadows. The town collects these dangerous residues and seals them in airtight containers called old dreams.
The Dream Reader’s role is to calm these echoes—to listen to the voices of old dreams and dream along with them, thereby reducing their power. This is a remarkable inversion: the act of reading dreams, which we normally associate with accessing hidden truths, becomes an act of neutralizing memory. The wall’s stability depends on continuous labor—the Dream Reader must keep working, or the sealed memories might break free and destroy everything. Forgetting, in this framework, is not a static condition but an ongoing process requiring maintenance.
The Map and Yellow Submarine Boy’s Reconstruction
The episode of the map provides another angle on memory’s persistence. Yellow Submarine Boy M–, who has never entered the walled town, produces an eerily accurate map of it based solely on fragments of the narrator’s disjointed monologues at Mr. Koyasu’s grave. The boy’s photographic memory allows him to assemble scattered, contextless information into a coherent spatial representation of the walled town.
This event unsettles the narrator’s understanding of cause and effect. Did his memory accurately describe the town, which the boy then reproduced? Or did the boy’s map retroactively reshape his memory? The question becomes unanswerable: “What was cause, and what was effect? How much was real, and how much had he simply made up?” The map suggests that memory is not a faithful recording but something that can be reconstructed from fragments, and that reconstruction itself changes what is remembered.
The map also triggers a physical response—the narrator’s heart trembles literally, not metaphorically—suggesting that the body remembers what the conscious mind cannot fully grasp. This bodily memory complicates the novel’s treatment of forgetting: even when memories are not consciously accessible, they persist as physical sensations.
Complexity and Contradiction
The novel resists any simple moral valuation of memory versus forgetting. The walled town requires forgetting to maintain its peace, but that peace comes at the cost of authenticity—the townspeople live in a state of attenuated existence, their emotional range deliberately narrowed. Yet the narrator’s memories of the girl outside the wall are also painful, marked by the trauma of her unexplained disappearance when they were seventeen.
The merging with Yellow Submarine Boy introduces further complexity. When the boy bites the narrator’s earlobe and they become one, the narrator cannot detect any change in himself. He cannot tell whether he has become more “the real me” or whether the concept of a unified self is itself an illusion. This suggests that memory and identity are not fixed properties but processes of continuous reconstruction. The question “Who am I?” becomes inseparable from “What do I remember, and what have I forgotten?”
The story of Mr. Tatsuya Koyasu and his son’s death adds another layer. The grief of losing a child is so overwhelming that it nearly destroys the parents’ will to live. The mother’s memory becomes a prison—she cannot stop replaying the decisions that led to the accident, blaming herself for not buying her son a dog instead of a bicycle. Here, memory is not a treasure but a torment, and forgetting would be a mercy. Yet the novel does not advocate for forgetting either; it simply presents the unbearable weight that memory can carry.
Symbol Connections
The wall itself symbolizes the boundary between remembering and forgetting—what is allowed in and what must be kept out. Yet the wall is “uncertain,” capable of changing shape like a living being, suggesting that this boundary is not fixed. When the narrator tries to map it, his efforts are met with a fever, as if the town punishes curiosity about its structure.
Shadows represent the forgotten parts of self, the expelled memories and emotions that cannot be integrated into the town’s peaceful existence. The narrator’s shadow is gaunt and dying, suggesting that forgetting is a form of self-amputation that ultimately weakens the self.
Old dreams are the stored remnants of expelled memories, sealed in containers like hazardous material. They must be read and calmed, implying that memories have agency—they do not simply fade but must be actively soothed.
The woodstove appears in scenes of reflection and warmth, often when the narrator is contemplating memory. It provides a physical focus for the act of remembering, a source of heat in a cold world.
Study Questions and Answers
1. Why does the girl in the walled town not remember the narrator, even though they shared a deep connection outside the wall?
Her forgetting is not accidental but a condition of the walled town’s existence. The town requires the separation of body and shadow, and with that separation comes the loss of personal history. The girl’s real self can only exist in the town by being stripped of memories that would tie her to the world outside. The forgetting is an active suppression—when she shows faint signs of recognition, the possibility is “sucked away and vanished,” suggesting an ongoing process of erasure rather than a permanent state.
2. What is the relationship between old dreams and expelled memories according to the shadow’s theory?
Old dreams are the remnants of real people who have been banished from the town. When body and shadow are separated, the body is exiled, but tiny seeds of emotion and memory remain behind. These residues—sadness, jealousy, love, fear—are sealed in airtight containers and stored deep in the library. The Dream Reader’s job is to calm these echoes by reading them, reducing their power so they cannot threaten the town. Old dreams are thus memory in a transformed state: neither fully present nor entirely absent.
3. How does Yellow Submarine Boy’s map challenge the narrator’s understanding of memory?
The map demonstrates that memory can be reconstructed from fragments with astonishing accuracy. The boy produces a detailed map based solely on the narrator’s disjointed monologues, yet the accuracy of the map raises unanswerable questions about causality: did the narrator’s memory produce the map, or did the map retroactively reshape the narrator’s memory? The episode suggests that memory is not a fixed record but a flexible construction that can be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled in different configurations.
4. What does the merging with Yellow Submarine Boy suggest about identity and self-knowledge?
When the boy merges with the narrator by biting his earlobe, the narrator cannot detect any change in himself, leading him to question whether he has become more “the real me” or whether the concept of a unified self is illusory. The merging implies that identity is not a fixed essence but a process of continuous integration and transformation. The narrator cannot decide whether he has changed because the self that would judge the change is itself part of what has changed.
5. How does Mr. Koyasu’s story of his son’s death complicate the novel’s treatment of memory and forgetting?
The story presents memory as potentially destructive: the mother cannot stop replaying the chain of decisions that led to the accident, and her memory becomes a prison of guilt and regret. Forgetting would be a mercy, yet the novel does not advocate for erasure. Instead, it presents the paradox that memory can be both precious and unbearable, and that there is no clean resolution—the parents must continue living with their grief, moving forward step by painful step, without the comfort of forgetting or the closure of complete understanding.