The City and Its Uncertain Walls

In autumn, in anticipation of the oncoming cold season, the beasts’ bodies were covered with a shiny, golden coat of fur. The single horns in their foreheads were sharp and white. They washed their hooves in the waters of the icy river, gently lifting their heads to enjoy the red nuts on the trees, and chew on the leaves of the Scotch broom.

That was a lovely time of year.

Standing on the watchtower built alongside the wall, I waited for the instrument—fashioned from a unicorn horn—to blow at twilight. Moments before the sun set the horn would sound—one long note, followed by three short ones. That was the rule. In the gathering dusk, the gentle sound of the horn slipped over the cobbled road, seemingly unchanged for over hundreds of years (or maybe even longer). And that sound had seeped into the gaps in the stone walls around the houses, and into the stone statues along the hedge in the plaza.

When the horn sounded out in the town, the beasts lifted their heads up toward ancient memories. Some stopped chewing leaves, some stopped pawing the road with their hooves, others awoke from naps in the last sunny spots of the day, all of them with heads raised at the same angle.

For a moment they all were frozen, like statues. Only their soft golden fur swayed in the breeze. But what were they gazing at? Their heads tilted in one direction, their eyes stared into space, but the beasts remained motionless, listening intently to the sounding of the horn.

When the final blow of the horn had faded away into the air, some scrambled to their feet, lining up their front legs, while others stretched and straightened up, and they all began walking at nearly the same moment. It was as if they had been released from a spell. Soon, the streets of the town clattered with the hooves of the beasts. The line of beasts continued down the winding cobblestone street, with no obvious leader, with no one guiding them along.

Eyes downcast, shoulders swaying slightly, they continued down to the silent river. Despite the silence, each beast was obviously connected by an undeniable bond.

As I watched this scene many times, I came to understand how precisely they kept to the same path and speed. Picking up other beasts along the way, they continued over the arched Old Bridge, to the plaza with its sharp steeple (where the clock in the clock tower, as you had said, was missing both hands). A small group that had gone down to the sandbank by the river to eat green grass now joined them. They continued upstream on the path beside the river, through the factory district alongside the dried-up canal that stretched out toward the north, and added another group that had been in the woods in search of nuts on trees. They next turned to the west, along the covered passageway of the foundry, climbing the long staircase traversing a hill on the north. There was but one gate in the wall surrounding the town.

Opening and closing it was the job of the Gatekeeper. The gate, heavy and solid, was reinforced with thick iron slabs nailed vertically and horizontally to it. Despite the gate’s formidable appearance, the Gatekeeper was able to easily open and close it. No one else was allowed to lay a finger on it.

The Gatekeeper was a large, sturdy man, devoted to his work. His pointy head was shaved clean, as was his face. Every morning he’d boil water in a large cauldron and carefully shave his head and face with a large, sharp razor. His age was unclear. He was also responsible for blowing the horn every morning and evening to assemble the beasts. He would climb up a six-and-a-half-foot-tall tower in front of his Gatekeeper’s cabin, aim the horn at the sky, and blow. How could such a crude, coarse-looking man produce such a soft, charming sound? I found this strange every time I heard it.

At twilight, once he’d shepherded every last beast outside the wall, he would close the heavy gate and lock it with a huge padlock. It clanged shut with a cold, metallic sound.

There was a place for the beasts just outside the north gate. There they would sleep, mate, give birth. This place had a forest and thickets, and a stream, and all of this, too, was walled in. It was a low wall, just a little over three feet, but for some reason the beasts couldn’t get over it. Or they didn’t try.

On either side of the gate, the wall had six watchtowers, with old, spiral wooden staircases that anyone could climb. From the top, you could see everything that the beasts were doing. But usually no one climbed the stairs. The residents of the town seemed to have little interest in the lives of the beasts.

For one week in the beginning of spring, though, people would climb the watchtowers to see the beasts do battle. Then the beasts were unimaginably aggressive and wild, with the males forgoing food in a desperate fight to win over the females. They’d bellow, and aim their sharp, single horns at their opponents’ neck and stomach.

It was only during that one-week mating season that the beasts did not enter the town, since the Gatekeeper kept the gate tightly locked then to protect the townspeople from danger. (And consequently, no horn sounded in the morning and night.) More than a few of the beasts were gravely wounded in the fights, some even dying from their injuries. And from the red blood that flowed onto the ground sprung a new order and new life. Like new buds that appear all at once on green willow branches in spring.

The beasts lived in a special cycle and order unknowable to us. Everything they did repeated in an orderly way, an order atoned for with their very blood. Once that violent week came to an end, when the gentle April rains washed away the blood, the beasts became tranquil, gentle creatures once more.

I’ve never witnessed that scene with my own eyes, however. I just heard about it from you.

The beasts in autumn squatted down here and there, their golden fur glistening in the evening sun, silently awaiting the echoes of the horn to be absorbed into the air. There were probably at least a thousand beasts.

And so another day in the town drew to a close. The days passed, the seasons changed. Yet days and seasons are but temporary things. The real time of the town is found elsewhere.

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An excerpt from The City and Its Uncertain Walls © 2024 by Haruki Murakami published by Knopf on November 19, 2024, and Atlantic Books on November 14, 2024.