On Nov. 19, Haruki Murakami welcomed the 15th addition to his bibliography in the form of “The City and Its Uncertain Walls.” As one of the most popular contemporary authors of the 21st century, Murakami’s latest novel built hype from his international fanbase from the moment of its announcement. However, that built-up anticipation made the end result all the more disappointing, as the work took the “uncertain” aspect of its title a little too seriously.

Though the book is listed as a novel, giving Murakami’s concoction the credit of having a cohesive narrative would be too generous. The book follows an unnamed male narrator in love with an unnamed woman since they were teenagers, grasping for a tangible emotional connection despite the woman’s disconnection from reality — literally.

As they get to know each other as teens, the girl reveals that the body she is currently in is only an artificial extension of her true self, which lives in a strange, magical town surrounded by great walls. Soon, she will leave this body and return to her town with no memory of the narrator.

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When this does happen, half of the novel is dedicated to following the “real” life of the narrator as he searches for his girlfriend while the other half follows the narrator trying to rebuild his relationship with the woman once he finds and enters the mythical town.

The woman works at the town’s library that houses not books, but old dreams. Naturally, the narrator takes up a job there as the Dream Reader, a job whose qualifications are as mysterious as the woman he entered the town for.

In classic Murakami style, the reader is caught between an interplay of dreams versus reality, wondering what can truly exist without a name. Also in classic Murakami style, he lengthily describes the teenage girl’s breasts four separate times within the first 50 pages.

Despite this being a new novel for the 75-year-old author, it echoes the flaws of his previous works that treat women as a vehicle for philosophical musings and sexual discovery, both of which eventually result in the male narrator developing unstable empathy for the first time.

In spite of the dreamy, magical features of a city with sentient walls and endless streets, the women of this novel are somehow more subversive and fantastical than the egglike dreams kept on the shelves of the library. The girl drives the action of this novel and yet brings to mind a vague kind of femininity à la the dead girlfriend in movies that is depicted through montages of her laughing intimately and running on a beach while looking over her shoulder.

Ultimately, the nebulous women of this novel point to a fundamental lack of groundedness in both plot and point. Murakami’s style is famously untethered to reality. With the two main characters as well as the city remaining unnamed, ambiguity is the name of the game when reading “The City and Its Uncertain Walls.” However, the novel’s abstractness feels less like an attempt at a universal moral fable and more like the sentimentality of teenage poetry.

Murakami does himself a disservice by opening the novel with an epigraph from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic “Kubla Khan,” a poem rooted in specifics in which descriptions of the setting tend to also reveal the narrator’s ambition.

In contrast, the meandering passages dedicated to the undefinable, cryptic town tend to indicate less about the narrator or his love and more about Murakami having an underdeveloped concept of what motivates his narrator beyond obsession and grief.

Readers can enjoy the direct familiarity of the narration being in second person as the narrator spends the novel talking to the girl about his journey to finding her, along with Murakami’s conversational and gentle voice.

Despite this immersion, it’s hard to say if anything ever actually happens in this novel or if it’s one long compilation of excerpts about a magical town glued together with a half-baked, recycled storyline of an oafish man chasing a mystifying woman that Murakami uses time and time again.

In fact, the town itself feels like the only fleshed-out character in the entire novel, maintaining a sense of identity more tangible than the two main characters.

Murakami’s imagination is alive and well with the city’s shape always shifting and its residents rarely questioning the city’s idiosyncrasies: The walls are guarded by an intimidating yet gentle Gatekeeper that greets all incoming inhabitants while the walls whisper to those within them, guiding the tide of its everyday happenings.

Unfortunately, any sense of curiosity a reader feels when learning about the city is squashed once the narration recenters around the two main characters and their ill-defined connection. The intriguing aspects of this novel are ultimately overshadowed by Murakami’s lack of commitment to considering character as an aspect of world-building rather than solely prioritizing location.