1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel (Harvill)
Haruki Murakami has always been a cult writer, if one can say that about a novelist who regularly sells millions, both in his native Japan and in Âtranslation. Well, 1Q84 –an epic romance in three “books” — is his cult novel. In Underground (2000) Murakami interviewed former members of the Aum sect and survivors of its 1995 nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo Âsubway. In the book he implicitly promised a fictional engagement with the subject of cults; now he has delivered.
At least two cults are active in this story. One is a Christian sect known as the Society of Witnesses and its pamphleteering members refuse life-saving surgery. The second cult is more Aumish and more mysterious. It is called Sakigake (which might mean “forerunner”, “precursor” or “pioneer”) and from two wounded escapees we hear some very nasty things about its leader.
Other groupings in the novel can also seem cult-like in structure. One of the two main characters is a maths teacher and writer, Tengo, who gets drawn by his editor into a literary conspiracy: he ghost-rewrites a novel by a teenage girl that then wins a prize and becomes a bestseller.
Parallel dimensions
Elsewhere in Tokyo, an elderly woman known only as the Dowager runs a shelter for female victims of domestic violence. To inflict clandestine punishment on the brutish men, she retains the services of the novel’s other main character: a woman named Aomame, a martial-arts instructor and physical therapist.
Nearly all Murakami’s novels play with the device of a parallel dimension into which characters can slip through cracks or portals, such as an emergency staircase leading down from a city expressway. The novel is set in 1984, but when Aomame sees a news report about the construction of a joint American-Soviet moon base, and then a second moon in the sky, she deduces that she has stumbled into a different universe, which she christens 1Q84: the “Q” stands for “question”.
Alternate worlds in previous Murakami works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Sputnik Sweetheart have usually been places where a man is looking for a woman he has lost. The same is true here, except that the search is mutual, and 1Q84 worries more disconcertingly about the possibility of becoming “irretrievably lost”, a phrase that appears several times, growing ever creepier.
Even in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, a purely naturalistic novel, the hero speaks of being “tossed” into a “labyrinth” to describe his impossible situation. In 1Q84, Tengo is lured into “chaotic territory” and calls the real world “labyrinth-like”. Aomame’s own brain becomes a maze: “her cerebrum — the grey labyrinth where consciousness resided”.
Exquisite tact
In outline, this vast novel’s plot is elementary: boy and girl meet, part and look for each other with the kind of melancholy yearning that Murakami has long tuned to a high art. The novelist has said, however, that he wanted to make this “simple” story as “complicated” as possible.
That he has certainly accomplished and the book’s sheer length virtually guarantees that a certain scene near the end, in a playground, will be tremendously affecting. But to make sure, Murakami had the courtesy to write it with exquisite tact. It is a scene in which complete mastery of technique makes technique vanish: as perfect as any two pages might hope to be.
Disparate pleasures are each given time to grow rich by the novel’s long span, especially a sad, funny and ultimately wrenching portrait of a private detective who unexpectedly becomes a third focus of third-person narration in the third book. 1Q84 is not self-consciously hard-boiled in the manner of Murakami’s early Âfiction (say, A Wild Sheep Chase), but it builds up gradually to a few passages of extremely potent suspense.
There are also rumbustious sex scenes — treated with the same tolerant, wholesome curiosity that Murakami devotes to the stir-frying of food — and a cluster of details that function as generous and reassuring fan service, such as a young woman with a beautiful ear, or the obligatory apparitions of cats and crows.
Some have considered ÂMurakami’s deployment of fantastical Âelements in his fiction to be fey or not Âjustified enough, but although events might be Âunnatural and outré, the Âcharacters in his novels are as human as possible. Murakami achieves this in two ways: through an unrushed, tender cataloguing of small daily action (preparing “steaming food”), and Âthrough the lovingly humorous imagining of his characters’ inner chatter.
Deep concerns
Cultural touchstones help to anchor people in Murakami’s shifting realities. There are references in 1Q84 to Chekhov, Stanley Kubrick, Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Macbeth and Carl Jung, although the most important works cited are musical. Janácek’s Sinfonietta plays a major role; an investigator muses playfully on Sibelius; and a woman discourses in bed on her love for the jazz clarinettist Barney Bigard.
The special importance of music in this novel is a key to its major theme, which is time: the suspicion that time is an illusion, the yearning to Ârecapture the past and the Âexperience of how time can get “deformed”, Âknotting itself “like a tangled string”. Murakami’s deep concerns here are more ÂProustian, which he signals when he has Aomame, holed up in hiding, read — or try to — In Search of Lost Time.
Some critics are unsure what to make of Murakami, the prejudice being that a writer who is so popular, particularly among young people, cannot really be that good, even if he is now quoted at short odds each year to win the Nobel prize for literature. But Murakami’s success illustrates a hunger for what he is doing that is unusual. Most characters in the Âmodern commercial genre called “Âliterary fiction” take for granted a certain unexamined metaphysics and worry exclusively about the higher-level complexities of circumstance and relationships.
But throughout Murakami’s Âoeuvre his characters never cease to express their bafflement about the nature of time, change, consciousness, moral choice, or the simple fact of finding themselves alive, in this world or another. In this sense Murakami’s heroes and heroines are all philosophers. It is natural, then, that his work should enchant younger readers to whom the problems of being are still fresh, as well as others who never grew out of such puzzlements — that his books should seem like an outstretched hand of sympathy to anyone who feels that they too have been tossed, without their permission, into a labyrinth. —