Murakami’s Traumatic Cities: When Time Stops in the Unconscious

By Xiaomeng Qiao

At seventy-one, Haruki Murakami returned to a story that had haunted him for forty years. He’d written The City and Its Uncertain Walls at thirty-one as his third novel, but dissatisfied, he’d shelved it. Years later, he reworked its core into Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, one of his early masterpieces. Yet the original story remained—as he describes it—“stuck in his throat.”[1] Four decades later, facing old age, he rewrote it completely. In the afterword—an unusual gesture for him—he quoted Jorge Luis Borges: “A writer can only truly tell a limited number of stories in their lifetime. We simply disguise these few themes in countless forms.”

I’m struck not just by what Murakami wrote, but by when and why he wrote it. This compulsive return—writing the story, abandoning it, rewriting it differently, then returning to the original after forty years—is itself a clinical phenomenon. In psychoanalytic terms, this is repetition compulsion in its purest form. The story isn’t just about trauma; the act of rewriting is the trauma seeking resolution.

What fascinates me is how Murakami’s fiction reveals something psychoanalysis has long theorized but struggles to articulate: trauma doesn’t just distort time—it destroys the very structure that makes time livable. And in this destruction the subject becomes trapped in what I’ve come to think of as “traumatic cities”—psychological spaces where time has stopped, where the past refuses to become past, where the future cannot be imagined.

This matters beyond literary criticism. Psychoanalytic writing on trauma is often necessarily abstract—we speak of time-skew, après-coup, dissociative enclaves. These concepts are clinically precise but experientially opaque. Murakami does something different: he builds trauma’s architecture in material form. His metaphors aren’t illustrations of existing theory; they’re independent maps of the same territory that are drawn from lived experience rather than clinical observation. The “traumatic city” is something a patient can see and recognize, not just a concept they must grasp. For clinicians, this offers a new way to listen—not just to what trauma survivors say, but to the temporal and spatial structures their narratives reveal. For anyone who has felt time collapse under grief or shock, Murakami’s cities offer the recognition that comes from seeing one’s invisible architecture made visible.

The Otherworld as Trauma Space

In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, the protagonist—a middle-aged man—voluntarily returns to a mysterious town he and his teenage beloved had imagined together decades ago. This town exists behind an “uncertain wall,” sealed off from reality, where clocks have no hands, seasons don’t change, and everything remains suspended in an ambiguous past. To enter, one must abandon one’s “shadow”—that part of the self that carries emotion, memory, pain. Inside, residents live without temporal progression, reading “old dreams” that contain the emotional residue expelled from the town’s psychic economy.

This setup appears in nearly all of Murakami’s major works. In Kafka on the Shore, Saeki loses her young lover and enters a psychic otherworld where time stops—she replays the same piano song at the same hour for decades. In 1Q84, Aomame enters a parallel world with two moons, symbolizing her split from consensual reality after trauma. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the “End of the World” is a place where residents have no shadows, no memories, and exist in frozen time.

I’ve come to see these otherworlds not as fantasy devices but as topographical maps of dissociation. Murakami’s East-West hybridity—his Japanese literary inheritance wrapped in Western narrative forms—perhaps makes this mapping legible to me in ways purely Western trauma theory does not. They are what happens when trauma overwhelms the ego’s integrative capacity—the psyche creates a separate space, walls it off, and deposits the unbearable material there. Murakami literalizes what Winnicott called the “transitional space” but with a crucial difference: his otherworlds aren’t playful or creative. They’re frozen. They’re where time goes to die.

Time Destroyed: The Psychoanalytic Architecture

How does trauma destroy time? Psychoanalysis has theorized this for decades, but the concepts remain challenging to grasp experientially. Let me trace the clinical literature first, then show how Murakami’s town makes these abstractions viscerally concrete.

Lenore Terr’s 1984 paper “Time and Trauma” identified two key distortions in traumatic time: time-skew (the misalignment of event sequences) and omen formation (the retrospective imposition of warning signs). Trauma survivors remember vivid details but lose their temporal sequence. They search for signs they should have seen, attempting to retroactively restore a sense of control over the uncontrollable. But Terr addressed discrete traumatic events. What happens when trauma becomes structural—not a rupture but a chronic state?

William Auerbach’s 2014 clinical work introduces the concept of time freezing. His patients live in what he calls an “eternal now,” where past trauma continuously intrudes into the present, collapsing the distance necessary for reflection. These patients don’t experience time as flow; they experience it as repetition without difference. The future becomes unimaginable because imagination requires standing outside the present moment—an exteriority that trauma forecloses.

Bob Bartlett deepens this with his concept of time-soaked experience. Unprocessed trauma doesn’t just freeze or skew time—it saturates it. The subject drowns in time itself as a traumatic medium, unable to distinguish between what has happened, what is happening, and what might happen.

This is precisely the temporal structure of Murakami’s town. Listen to how he describes it:

“There, all time is vague. Although there’s a tall clock tower in the central square, it has no hands.”

“Because here, everything is forever.”

“Because time doesn’t exist, time is infinite.”

“In a place without time, there is no accumulation. What seems like accumulation is merely a fleeting phantom projected by ‘now.’ Imagine turning pages in a book. The page changes, but the page number doesn’t. There’s no thread connecting the new page to the previous one. The surrounding landscape transforms endlessly, yet we remain in the same position.”

The town is not a metaphor for trauma. It is trauma’s temporal structure made visible.

The Wall, the Shadow, and Old Dreams

Murakami constructs a complete symbolic system around trauma’s operations. Let me trace three key elements:

· The Wall functions as a dissociative barrier. It isolates the town from reality, just as dissociation walls off traumatic material from consciousness. The wall shifts shape, using people’s fears against them—it’s not just a boundary but an active defense, preventing both entry and exit. This is the psyche’s protective mechanism turned prison: what once shielded the subject from overwhelming affect now traps them in stasis.

· The Shadow represents the emotional, embodied self that must be abandoned to enter the town. Initially, I read this through a Jungian lens—the shadow as rejected parts of the self. But as the novel progresses, the meaning shifts. The protagonist’s shadow lives outside the town, continuing in the real world while the protagonist remains within. Shadow and body aren’t opposed but interdependent—neither can survive long without the other. This suggests that trauma doesn’t simply split the self into “good” and “bad” parts. Rather, it creates a spatial separation between the part that can feel and the part that must continue functioning.

· Old Dreams are the town’s archive of expelled emotions—grief, longing, doubt, love, despair. The protagonist becomes a “dream reader,” processing these emotional residues. This is strikingly close to the analytic process itself: the analyst receives, metabolizes, and returns affects the patient couldn’t process alone. But in the town, this process happens in isolation, without the relational matrix that makes therapeutic containment possible.

The Twin Structure: Symbiosis and Impossible Love

A pattern runs through Murakami’s work: early, intense, almost twin-like relationships that cannot survive separation. In Norwegian Wood, Naoko and Kizuki form this bond; Kizuki’s death leaves Naoko unable to continue living. In Kafka on the Shore, Saeki and her young lover are inseparable until his death freezes her in permanent mourning. In The City, the protagonist and the girl develop such intense connection that her disappearance stops his internal clock:

That summer, I was seventeen. And in my inner world, time essentially froze there. The clock’s hands did indeed keep moving forward, marking time, but for me, real time—the clock buried in my heart’s wall—stopped moving, ceased advancing from that moment. The nearly thirty years since then seem to have been spent merely filling in blanks.

This is what psychoanalysis calls symbiotic relationship—the failure to differentiate between self and other, leading to catastrophic collapse when separation occurs. These relationships feel like twin bonds because developmental separation never fully happened. The other remains not just beloved but constitutive of the self.

Here’s the mechanism that links symbiosis to frozen time: Time requires a subject who can stand outside the present moment. To experience temporal flow—to feel yesterday becoming today, today moving toward tomorrow—requires an observing position, a perspective from which change becomes visible. But in symbiotic relationships, there is no “outside.” If self and other are fused, if the boundary between I and you has never solidified, then there is no position from which to witness time’s passage. When the symbiotic other disappears, the self doesn’t just lose a person—it loses the relational matrix that made temporality possible. Time stops because the subject who could experience time has collapsed.

Murakami references García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera as the novel’s only citation—a love that remains forever impossible, forever unconsummated. This impossible love connects to what Freud called the “lost object”—not just a person we’ve lost, but the illusion of merger we must relinquish to become separate subjects. Murakami’s protagonists refuse this relinquishment. They remain attached to the lost object, and in that attachment, time stops.

Trust and the Possibility of Thaw

In the novel’s final section—notably the shortest and most ambiguous—a Yellow Submarine Boy appears. He reads dreams faster than the protagonist, suggesting an accelerated capacity for metabolizing trauma. When the protagonist merges with this boy and decides to leave the town, he’s told:

“We are essentially floating in emptiness. There’s nothing to hold onto. But we haven’t fallen. To begin falling, time must flow. If time stands still, we’ll remain suspended in emptiness forever.”

“If something goes wrong and time starts moving again, we’ll fall from a great height, and it will likely be fatal.”

“Trust that someone on the ground will catch you. Trust it from the bottom of your heart, without reservation, without condition.”

“Trusting your double means trusting yourself.”

This is the closest Murakami comes to articulating how trauma might loosen: through trust in an other who remains outside the traumatic space. The protagonist’s shadow—the part of him that kept living, kept feeling—waits outside. If he can trust that this shadow/self will catch him, time can begin moving again.

I notice how tentative this resolution feels. The third section is brief, “linguistically vague,” as if Murakami himself isn’t fully convinced. He’s spent forty years writing this story, and even now he can’t quite articulate the way out. This incompleteness is itself clinically significant. Trauma that remains “stuck in the throat” doesn’t yield to neat resolution. The compulsion to rewrite the story is the ongoing attempt at working-through—an attempt that may never fully succeed.

What Remains Stuck

Doris Brothers, in her 2012 paper on Murakami, argues that healing trauma requires rebuilding interpersonal trust—not through anger or catharsis, but through relationships that can hold uncertainty without collapse. The Yellow Submarine Boy and the waiting shadow represent this possibility: a trusted other, a part of the self that remained connected to life outside the frozen town.

But I’m left with a question Murakami himself seems unable to answer: Can trauma ever fully release its hold? He’s written this story three times across four decades. Each telling tries to work through the same material—the loss, the frozen time, the impossible love. And each time, the ending remains provisional, uncertain.

Perhaps this is the deepest clinical truth the novels reveal: some traumas don’t resolve. They metabolize slowly, incompletely. We return to them not because we’ve failed to “work through,” but because working-through is this return—this compulsive rewriting, this building and rebuilding of traumatic cities in the imagination, hoping that this time the story might end differently.

Murakami writes at seventy-one that he had to tell this story now or never. Even after a long, successful marriage—even after a seemingly happy life—the story remains “stuck in his throat.” Why does a happily married man spend his life writing about traumatic loss and impossible love? I don’t know. And perhaps that’s the point. Trauma keeps its secrets, even from those who carry it.

What I do know is this: the traumatic city exists in all of us who have known time’s collapse. Murakami has simply built it with extraordinary precision, brick by brick, wall by wall, dream by dream. And in doing so, he’s created a map of a territory psychoanalysis names but rarely visualizes: the space where time goes to die and where some part of us remains, forever seventeen, forever waiting, forever reading old dreams in a town without clocks.

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This article is part of our series “More Alive”: Books, edited by Daria Colombo.

About the Series:

“Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive.” --Cynthia Ozick.

For some of us, novel reading is an unbreakable habit, frequent solace, excursion, and enclave par excellence. Fiction reading is an ideal preparation for future psychoanalysts and perhaps the best CME (continuing medical education) for established ones, letting us keep company with those minds outside of psychoanalysis who are most curious about our inner lives and certainly better able to make them come alive in writing. This series is a conversation with books we have found compelling, books that have acted upon us as readers, that have made us rethink our psychoanalytic ideas, or that have explained some aspect or moment of psychoanalytic work more clearly than our theories can. We won’t focus on applying psychoanalysis to literature but rather on applying literature to us as psychoanalysts.

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About the Author:

Xiaomeng Qiao is a psychoanalyst-in-training and doctoral student based in the United Kingdom. His work sits at the intersection of psychoanalysis, Chinese culture, gender, and queerness. He writes Chinese Psychoanalytic Scene on Substack.

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About the Editor

Daria Colombo, M.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at The New York Psychoanalytic Institute and a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is an Associate Editor and on the Board of Directors of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and is a member of The Center for Advanced Psychoanalytic Studies. She won the Gertrude and Ernst Ticho prize in 2021 and is a past winner of the IJP’s Sacerdoti Prize as well as The New York Psychoanalytic Institute Foundation Award for Candidate Writing. She writes about the analytic frame, literature, feminism, and neutrality. Her most recent paper “Autotheory: Towards the Embodying of Analytic Framing” was awarded the JAPA prize in 2024. Dr. Colombo practices in New York City.

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References:

Auerbach, W. (2014). Time and timelessness in the psychoanalysis of an adult with severe childhood trauma. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31:452-467.

Bartlett, B. (2017). Time-Soaked: how trauma submerges in and out of time. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 33:268-282.

Brothers, D. (2012). Murakami, connoisseur of uncertainty: commentary on paper by Thomas Rosbrow. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 22:334-340.

Kawabata, N. (2002). The need to know. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12:807-828.

Mondrzak, V., et al. (2007). Trauma, causality and time: some reflections. Revista de Psiquiatria do Rio Grande do Sul, 29:238-244.

Potik, D. (2023). Existential issues in the fictional writing of Haruki Murakami. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83:62-85.

Terr, L. C. (1984). Time and trauma. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 39:633-665.

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[1] Treisman, D. (2024). Haruki Murakami on Rethinking Early Work, Nov. 10, 2024. Retrieved: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/haruki-murakami-on-rethinking-early-work