The City and Its Uncertain Walls

by Haruki Murakami

The map was simply drawn, yet it seemed to contain some sort of power. For four days, alone in my room, with the map before me, I wandered in that world that isn’t here, caught up so deeply in that visual hallucination machine (type of thing) I gradually couldn’t tell which world I belonged to. Like some eighteenth-century aesthetic poet addicted to opium in search of a pure illusion.

It’s a strange way of putting it, but for me, Mr. Koyasu seemed much more alive, someone I felt the breath of life in, more than any of the actual living people around me. This held true not just for this town, but for everywhere I’d ever lived. I loved his unique personality, and felt empathy toward his unswerving way of life. Fate had not been kind to him, yet he never lapsed into self-pity but did his utmost to make his life—for himself, and for those around him—something meaningful.

The map that the boy drew had a power about it that was intriguing—bewitching, even. It wasn’t just some map in black ink on a A4 sheet. Instead it summoned something from the viewer’s heart, something normally hidden deep within, something with an intense power inside.

“But you’re not being pursued by anyone, and don’t need to stay out of sight. You just need to go ahead and live the life you’ve chosen.”

García Márquez, a Colombian novelist who had no need of the distinction between the living and the dead. What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal? I think there might be. No, not might—there is one. But it’s an entirely uncertain wall. Depending on circumstances and the person, its texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being.