Murakami's Allegory of the Cave - Anika

    When reading "The City and Its Uncertain Walls," one line I found interesting was “Maybe those driven outside the wall are the real people, and those who remain here are the shadows” (Ch. 20). This line immediately reminded me of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s story, people are chained inside a cave, only able to see the shadows of real objects. The prisoners mistake the shadows for reality because they’ve never seen anything else. When one prisoner escapes, he’s blinded by the sunlight at first but eventually realizes the outside world is the real one. The journey into the light represents enlightenment, or more specifically the  process of finding truth after living in an illusion.

    Murakami reverses this logic: his protagonist steps into the cave, or rather a walled city where people’s shadows are stripped away. Without their shadows, people lose the emotional aspects of what it means to be human, trapped in a world that looks orderly but, as the narrator’s shadow later says, “it’s all just an illusion” (Ch. 24). The city is “full of contradictions,” built in a way that removes anything that doesn’t fit its logic. The inner workings of the city only appear to make sense to people on the inside. In that way, the people inside the wall are like Plato’s prisoners, mistaking what they see for truth because it’s all they’ve ever known. 

For both Plato and Murakami, truth seems to exist beyond the wall or cave, on the outside. However, what’s different is the choice the characters make once they realize it. Plato’s freed prisoner leaves the cave permanently, even though it’s painful. Murakami’s narrator, on the other hand, understands that the outside world might be “real,” yet he chooses to stay within the city’s illusion. He chooses to stay because he comes to the acceptance that truth isn’t always something we can live with.

    So instead of rejecting Plato, Murakami questions him in a way. His story suggests that seeing the truth and living with it are two different things. So even though the narrator in Murakami finds the exit, he chooses not to leave.