Merely a shadow, tracing an outline and pretending to be me.

Thoughts on The City and its Uncertain Walls (Murakami, 2024)

I’m almost finished what has been an extraordinary few days of reading Haruki Murakami’s most recent masterpiece The City and its Uncertain Walls. I’ve been an avid reader of Haruki and his work for years - I’ve loved his writing, marvelled at his insights and joyfully inhabited his imaginative inventiveness. His novels, I’d go so far as to say, have (for better or for worse) contributed significantly towards making me both the man and the coach that I am today.

But I’ve never wept my way through one of his books before.

Self understanding. Shadow and self. The nature of soul. Consciousness and death. Reality and Estrangement. Experiencing the many faces of love.

Woven together in such delicate patterns, touching such depths of the heart.

‘Transfixed’ is probably a good word to use about how I’ve responded.

Nothingness, eternity, and soul - I forgot to mention that one. I look at this line and though my mind struggles to fully comprehend it my body speaks to me of its truth. I wonder what happens in you….

I carry stuff in my heart that only an anam cara will ever see. Not necessarily because it’s traumatic to speak about, or been painful for me to have gone through the process of gathering it up - but because I need to be with those with whom I can go beyond the limits of language in order to open this particular window into the mutuality of loving attunement.

And without an open window to try to share would possibly create an unnecessary sense of estrangement. And I’m not willing to take that chance.

And those with whom I go on developmental journeys will undoubtedly feel the same. So I should never presume that I’ll become their anam cara. No matter how close our relationship becomes.

These are two of the many astounding sentences on the nature of shadow. I’d love to sit with you with a glass of wine and wander with you through them all.

But, for now, if either of these two phrases touch anything deep inside you I;d love to hear your thoughts.

And then there’s love.

At heart this is novel is an exploration of everything it is to love.