The City and Its Uncertain Walls

by Haruki Murakami

Writing Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was a thrilling experience for me. And a lot of fun, as well. I published it as a book in 1985. I was thirty-six then. A period when all sorts of things forged ahead on their own. — As the years passed by, though, and as I gained more experience as a writer and grew older, I couldn’t help but think that I hadn’t seen this unfinished, or perhaps immature, work, The City, and Its Uncertain Walls, through to its conclusion. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was one response to the original story, but I thought a different form of response might be worth doing, too. Not overwriting the earlier work but instead creating a story that coexisted with it, so that the two complemented each other. Yet a vision of what form that other response would take still eluded me.

Note from afterward