The ambivalent utopia: layers of nostalgia and memory in Murakami Haruki’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Scholarship has often been skeptical about nostalgia in Murakami’s narratives of self-discovery in postwar and late-capitalist Japan. This article, however, takes a different view, suggesting that nostalgia has a constructive role. This article explores the tension between two layers of nostalgia—the individual and the instrumental—in Murakami’s latest publication, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. In this novel, nostalgia helps the narrator reconstruct his self-identity and continuity by critically re-engaging with his past, transforming it into a meaningful personal narrative. However, it cannot be overlooked that within the postwar Japanese context, nostalgia can also be co-opted by the state as a tool for constructing an idealized, ambiguous utopia, potentially erasing memories of the war in favor of rapid modernization. Within the tension of the two layers of nostalgia lies the rekindled individuality once suppressed by the rigidity of a governing system.