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Paper short abstract

By comparing Murakami’s evolving library spaces, this paper shows how The City and Its Uncertain Walls positions the Z** Town Library as a non-institutional, unhistorical counter-memory space that resists postwar systemic historicity and enables a reflexive, self-restorative mode of nostalgia.

Paper long abstract

This paper offers an analysis of the dual-library system in Haruki Murakami’s latest novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls, situating the novel within a comparative genealogy of libraries across Murakami’s oeuvre. Drawing on Jan Assmann’s cultural memory theory, Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, and Nietzsche’s notion of the “unhistorical,” I argue that the Z** Town Library marks a decisive departure from earlier Murakami libraries that operate under institutional, ideological, or epistemic constraints—such as the Komura Library in Kafka on the Shore, the communal library of Hard-Boiled Wonderland, and the disciplinary architecture of The Strange Library.

Through its non-institutional autonomy, pre-digital anachronism, and deliberate absence of historical sedimentation, the Z** Town Library embodies what Murakami calls a ‘space of individual recovery’: a liminal zone where memory circulates outside the purview of what Nietzsche and Nora describe as the historicizing violence of the modern system. In contrast to postwar Japan’s technocratic library apparatus—shaped by state ideology, modernization discourses, and democratic-educational agendas—this library resists the epistemic authority of the archive and instead privileges affective, interpersonal, and idiosyncratic modes of remembering.

The narrator’s nostalgic dialogue with the deceased Mr. Koyasu and the boy M**’s construction of an encyclopedic ‘personal library’ illustrate a model of memory that is neither state-sanctioned nor system-compatible. Rather than reproducing hegemonic narratives, the Z** Town Library fosters a reflexive, self-constitutive form of nostalgia that reactivates personal history as a resource for self-continuity. This process culminates when M** carries his ‘ultimate personal library’ into the walled Town, inserting non-systemic memory into a closed disciplinary structure and destabilizing its temporal regime of timelessness and forgetting.

By comparing Murakami’s shifting library architectures, the paper shows how The City and Its Uncertain Walls reconfigures the logic of memory and subject formation within Murakami’s recent narrative project. The Z** Town Library functions as a counter-institutional utopia that interrogates postwar regimes of knowledge, history, and individuality, offering an alternative epistemology in which nostalgia becomes generative, dialogic, and ultimately emancipatory.