Haruki Murakami's *La ciudad y sus muros inciertos* emerges as a fascinating nexus within this cluster, bridging disparate literary landscapes through its signature exploration of identity, reality, and the elusive nature of connection. While your engagement with Murakami’s enigmatic narrative yielded a 2-star rating, it acts as a potent, albeit sometimes challenging, counterpoint to other highly-rated works, illuminating nuanced preferences in how you encounter the human condition. The novel’s central premise, where a young protagonist grapples with the disappearance of a girl and her fantastical descriptions of a walled city, resonates with a recurring thematic thread: the construction and deconstruction of unseen boundaries that shape our lives. This echoes the conceptual bridge found in Hiromi Kawakami's *El señor Nakano y las mujeres*, where the *elusive nature of connection* is explored not through surreal landscapes, but through grounded, everyday observations that forge subtle yet profound bonds. Murakami, in contrast, often dissects isolation through these surreal landscapes, suggesting an exploration of disconnection that you might find more potent in Kawakami's approach.
The novel's exploration of the self finding its true essence within a mysterious, walled city also draws a parallel to Han Kang's *Imposible decir adiós*. While Kang delves into the stark realities of grief and memory to reveal how internal landscapes are dictated by external constraints, Murakami employs the surreal to probe a similar *existential unease*. This shared conceptual territory, where the "uncertain walls" of our lives are revealed to be as much internal as external, highlights your appreciation for narratives that dissect the forces shaping human identity, even if Murakami’s more indirect method in *La ciudad y sus muros inciertos* didn’t fully capture your attention compared to Kang's directness. Furthermore, the fragmented realities and unspoken truths that permeate Murakami's work find a dialogue with Fernanda Melchor's *Temporada de huracanes*. Despite their distinct narrative *VIBES/MOODs*, both authors excavate the raw, often uncomfortable, but ultimately illuminating core of human experience by interrogating existence through intensely personal, yet universally resonant, inner landscapes. Melchor's visceral realism and Murakami's introspective melancholy, both dealing with fragmented realities, suggest a deep-seated value you place on works that explore the human psyche through its often unsettling depths.
The appeal Murakami attempts to achieve in *La ciudad y sus muros inciertos*—navigating *urban alienation* and existential malaise—connects, albeit at a distance, with your profound 5-star adoration for Charles Baudelaire's *Las flores del mal*. While the genre is worlds apart, both authors grapple with the human condition and the often-ugly beauty within it. Your appreciation for Baudelaire’s potent translation of this sensibility into verse suggests a high bar for contemporary narrative attempts, implying that Murakami’s execution in *La ciudad* may have fallen short of the profound emotional resonance and aesthetic force you find in the classic. This pairing reveals not an alignment in style, but a shared appreciation for artistic endeavors confronting existential questions, even when one artist's vision resonates more deeply. The novel’s fractured narrative and exploration of the subconscious also stand in contrast to your 5-star immersion in Jorge Luis Borges's *Borges profesor: Curso de literatura inglesa*. Borges’s meticulous exploration and commitment to intellectual scaffolding represent an appreciation for *ordered universes of thought*, a distinct preference from Murakami's more amorphous landscapes of the subconscious. While Murakami offers narrative explorations, he evidently didn’t provide the same structural resonance, suggesting a divergence in what you seek from a literary experience: certainty and established tradition versus the subconscious's fluid domain.
Crucially, the bridge in your appreciation for *La ciudad y sus muros inciertos*, despite its 2-star rating, is illuminated by your higher rating for Juan Rulfo’s *Pedro Páramo*. Both works, in their own ways, embody the unreliability of memory and communication through dense, mythopoetic landscapes. While Murakami’s fragmented narratives in *La ciudad* might have lacked the desired clarity, your enjoyment of Rulfo’s *Pedro Páramo* signals a resonance with how a seemingly chaotic tapestry of voices and locations can forge a singular, haunting experiential truth. This suggests that while *La ciudad y sus muros inciertos* may have felt intentionally elusive, its exploration of how external environments and internal perception can warp into *unreliable landscapes*, a theme also present in Yoshikazu Takeuchi's *Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis*, is a territory you find compelling, even when the execution differs from your expectations. The way Murakami's characters grapple with meaninglessness and connection, a common thread with Gabriel García Márquez's *Cien años de soledad*, highlights your appreciation for grand narratives that make the intangible tangible, whereas *La ciudad's* more elliptical approach might have felt less satisfying. Ultimately, *La ciudad y sus muros inciertos*, while perhaps not fully achieving its aims for you with this particular rating, serves as a fascinating point of comparison, revealing a complex interplay between your appreciation for surreal introspection, the architecture of unseen walls, and the enduring quest for identity within fluid realities.