For the retiring few months , everywhere I go in San Francisco , I see young people in cool equip all reading the same book : Haruki Murakami ’s long - awaited 1Q84 . Not long ago , I was in a café where three out of the twelve patrons all had identical hardcovers , with the same blank stare gaze upwardly from their dense Page .
Haruki Murakami is a living legend of surreal , universe - bend fiction . And 1Q84 is his first novel in four years . How does it pile up to his classic ? And what is Murakami ’s curious tailspin on the humanity of 1984 telling us about the world we endure in ? Spoilers ahead …
Top image : Alex Mercado .
I only just finished 1Q84 , so this is sort of a first stamp . I have a flavor that over the week that fall out , bits and pieces of the novel will float back into my mind , especially some of its many unearthly image . Like the “ air chrysalis ” that the supernatural creatures in Murakami ’s eldritch world create out of hairsbreadth and bit of soul - stuff , this novel is a shimmering indistinct tangle of many eldritch connections and narration strands , out of which something mysterious and unknowable is born .
It took me several weeks to finish reading 1Q84 , because I was hear to follow all of the novel ’s many piffling filament and avoid missing any random clues that Murakami seed into the story . In the destruction , I ’m still not totally trusted what this Word of God was about , but a number of themes do creep into it .
First of all , a disclaimer — I ’m not exactly a Murakami expert . I record a few of his novel a decade ago , but I ’m not as immerse in his work as a lot of other people . Still , off the top of my head , I would n’t recommend 1Q84 to someone who ’s never read Murakami before — much good to begin with Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World , or maybe Wild Sheep Chase . 1Q84 is definitely not Murakami ’s best novel , but I still enjoyed bit and pieces of it .
For all its complexness and sprawling outlandishness , 1Q84 is a fairly simple novel . It has two protagonists : Tengo and Aomame .
Tengo is a math teacher and conk out literary author , who gets sucked into a moonstruck scheme to revise a brilliant but flawed novel called Air Chrysalis by a 17 - year - old girl named Fuka - Eri . The only problem is , Fuka - Eri ’s novel contain some metaphysical secret of a foreign rage call Sakigake , and when Tengo ’s rewrite becomes a bestseller , he attracts the fad ’s unfriendly care .
Meanwhile , Aomame is on her way of life to an important coming together when her taxi catch stuck in dealings , so she climbs down an emergency staircase off the highway , ignoring the taxi number one wood ’s warning that doing so will make everything seem quite different . shortly , she finds herself in an alternative world where the U.S. and the Soviet Union are build up a Moonbase together . And there are two Moons in the sky . She dubs this foreign new world 1Q84 , because it ’s like an alternating version of the “ real ” 1984 .
( I wo n’t give away a lot of the major plot points in the novel here , like what Aomame is on her fashion to do in that important coming together . )
In a sensation , both Tengo and Aomame create alternating worlds — Tengo by rewriting the fancy novel , and Aomame by traveling off the normal way . And over the course of the novel , their stories modernise more and more intersections , until we see how they ’re altogether interconnected — and meanwhile , we learn that they apportion an of import moment in the past times , as well . They also become out to have similarly tormented childhoods , in which their parent were both strict and overly demanding , until they finally broke gratis around puberty .
Like a lot of Murakami novel , the whole affair moves with dream logic as much as regular story system of logic — events go around and around and seem to duplicate with slight magnetic variation , until the characters at random extend to a realization that seems to come out of nowhere but is miraculously correct . Meanwhile , there are lots of fit of people eating yakiniku or heed to music and talking about lit or philosophy , or wait out the windowpane and thinking stuff over . ( I do n’t remember Murakami ’s other novels being quite as slow or repetitive as this one , though . )
The mythology that emerges from Fuka - Eri ’s fantasy world , as well as the house of cards realism of 1Q84 , is complex and demented , but it all seems to boil down to being a metaphor for the physical process of universe , and writing . Tengo , we get word , is a “ Receiver , ” while Fuka - Eri is a “ observer , ” and this is a quasi - intimate relationship which can moderate to the creative activity of a womblike Air Chrysalis .
Early on in the book , Tengo explains that math is beautiful because it ’s predictable and totally coherent . And then Fuka - Eri asks why , if he roll in the hay mathematics so much , he choose to write fable . He answers :
veridical life is different than maths . Things in living do n’t necessarily flow over the shortest potential route . For me , math is — how should I put it ? — mathematics is all too born . It ’s like beautiful scene . It ’s just there . There ’s no pauperism to exchange it with anything else . That ’s why , when I ’m doing math , I sometimes sense I ’m turning transparent . And that can be scary . … When I ’m write a story , I employ words to translate the fence in conniption into something more natural for me . In other watchword , I reconstruct it . That way , I can confirm without a doubt that this soul known as ‘ me ’ exists in the world . This is a totally different process from steeping myself in the world of math .
In other Scripture , as Fuka - Eri summarizes , writing fiction is a way of confirming “ that you subsist . ”
Much later in the Koran , Fuka - Eri say something sort of similar about things not take the “ short possible path ” :
Humans see clock time as a straight channel . It ’s like invest notches on a long straight stick . The notch here is the futurity , the one on this side is the yesteryear , and the present is this point in good order here … But in reality , time is n’t a unbent line . It does n’t have a shape . In all senses of the term , it does n’t have any form . But since we ca n’t render something without form in our minds , for the rice beer of gismo we understand it as a full-strength tune . At this point , mankind are the only unity who can make that sort of conceptual substitution .
So in a common sense , the circular , volute , meandering tale of 1Q84 is an attack to expend fable to show the true nature of time . ( As the novel hold out on , the timeline gets more and more jumbled , because every fourth dimension we shift POV grapheme , we jump ahead or backwards in time . ) And 1Q84 is n’t an “ alternate timeline , ” in any meaningful sense , but rather a prison term house of cards , in which thing have their own sort of inevitability and mass get thread together , just as Tengo and Aomame are slowly drawn together .
There ’s a lot of other material go on in this novel , including someone in a comatoseness somehow creating a ghost that live on door - to - door trying to amass money for the goggle box company . Several other random details , includingJanáček ’s Sinfonietta , keep cropping up . And there ’s a recurring motive of fantastically creepy sexuality with underage girls , including Fuka - Eri herself ( who ’s evidently supposed to be aphrodisiac , but curve up just being all - around creepy . ) There are various other types of horrifying sex , which is horrendously key . The nature of religion and notion in God keeps come up as a whimsy as well , as Aomame goes from despising all religion to embracing belief in God again .
In the end , this is one of those books that forms a anatomy in your mind over meter , both as you ’re reading it and later on . There ’s more than enough food for cerebration , and arresting weird double in this book to keep you pondering and reading .
In the ending , though , this is by all odds far from being Murakami ’s solid oeuvre — for one thing , the repetition of plot of land detail more than outstay its welcome . And far from being poetical , the meanderings in the Holy Scripture often feel drably prosaic , although that could be partially a fallible translation .
People often say that Murakami ’s books are n’t really about plot of land , but this one feels as though it ’s really overly obsess with plot — to the point where fundamental secret plan points are forge home , over and over . And the final third of the Word of God feels , honestly , like a letdown , with a whole new POV character introduced for no intellect and a weakly conclusion . ( Readherefor a fairly summary summary of how the novel peters out . )
So yeah — I would n’t of necessity advocate 1Q84 to Murakami neophytes . But it ’s still got enough ample imagery and neat ideas to be worth delving into — especially if you ’re hungry for a novel about approximation , in which the power of storytelling is approached in a very dissimilar style than the one you typically see from Western author .
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