Architectures Of Uncertainty: Possible Worlds, Walled Selves, And Narrative Reality in Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 And the City and Its Uncertain Walls

Criticism Critics have viewed Haruki Murakami’s “other world” as an inherent component of his imagination instead of a construct with a history behind it. By comparing 1Q84 (2009–2010) to The City and Its Uncertain Walls (2023), this study demonstrates a change in the narrative ontology of the author. It utilizes Brian McHale’s “ontological dominant,” Marie-Laure Ryan’s possible-worlds narratology, and the theory of memory and narrative identity by Paul Ricoeur to prove that both novels represent stages of the development of the poetics of ontological uncertainty. In 1Q84, uncertainty acquires a specific external manifestation: reality gets divided into different worlds, marked with a second moon, and a narrative embedded in the main story, Air Chrysalis, contaminates the latter’s world. The city internalizes the same uncertainty: the alternative world is walled, entered by surrendering one’s shadow, and sustained by memory and the reading of dreams, so that division migrates from the cosmos into the self. Storytelling operates in each novel as an ontological activity, but the later work relocates it from writing to reading. Murakami’s late fiction, the study contends, transforms the alternative world from a space the subject enters into a structure produced through memory, narrative, and divided subjectivity, replacing the question “Which world is real?” with the question of how reality is made.