Either Way You Turn, I’ll Be There: The Wall That Moves With You

While reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls, I was reminded of Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls.” The song's lyrics — “And either way you turn, I’ll be there / Open up your skull, I’ll be there” — echo the novel's unsettling sense that even in solitude, you are never truly alone. This struck me because it mirrors how Murakami’s wall doesn’t just keep people in or out, it infiltrates the mind – it moves, reappears, and watches. 

In Chapter 24, the narrator is confronted with this directly. He comes upon a wall that appears out of nowhere — one that wasn’t there before: “I suddenly knew: The wall was able to freely change its shape and location. It could move anywhere it wanted to. And the wall had decided not to let us get out.” This wall isn’t a fixed boundary. It’s an omnipresent, sentient force that adapts to your thoughts, your fears, your movements. It relies on fear to separate the inside from the outside. 

As the narrator continues forward, the wall shifts from threats to taunts that anticipate failure: “No way you guys can get through the wall. Even if you did get through one, another wall would be waiting for you” (Chapter 25). These are psychological tactics. The main deterrent is not physical – the wall doesn’t have to stop you; it just has to make you stop yourself. Thus, what actually stops you are the internalized rules that you accept before you even try to break them. 

This is where I saw the connection to the song — in “Climbing Up the Walls,” the haunting is embedded in your psyche, rather than being imposed from the outside: “Open up your skull, I’ll be there.” In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, chillingly, the wall mocks the narrator and says: “Run as far away as you’d like… I will always be there” (Chapter 24). 

Interestingly, this is not a warning — it’s a guarantee that no matter where you flee, no matter how fast or far, escape is just an illusion if the watcher is already inside you. The phrasing “I’ll be there” and “I will always be there” is also perturbing, since it subverts what is usually a comforting sentiment and turns it into a promise of invasive surveillance. 

The terrifying thing about Murakami’s wall isn’t that it can’t be climbed – It’s that it becomes a part of you. The City and Its Uncertain Walls reflects how fear can create walls within the psyche, leaving us trapped not by someone else but by ourselves.

Irina