1Q84

I’ve just finished reading Haruki Murakami’s latest novel: 1Q84.  Actually, I finished reading it two days ago and have spent the intervening time just thinking about it and whether or not it lived up to my expectations. 


Before getting to that, however, a little bit about Murakami.  He is a highly-thought of Japanese novelist who has written many novels and short-stories, not all of them available in English.  He has many fans among literary critics, but some detractors as well.The English translation of his “break-through” novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, was published in the US in 1997.  I read and enjoyed it quite a bit.  Like 1Q84, the story has fantastical elements and requires the reader to “go with it.”  Personally, I like touches of supernaturalism or “magic” in stories; not outright fantasies, but just enough other-worldly occurrences to keep it interesting. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was original and sometimes seemed needlessly complicated, but I liked the twists and turns and the resolution.If you like to read dialogue and action-driven, cleanly plotted novels, Murakami is not for you!  What I find and enjoy about Murakami is his deft hand at introspection.  He spends quite a bit of time and many, many pages sharing his characters’ thoughts , motivations, and most trivial behaviors.  But the reader comes across many small gems as a result of this thoughtful writing; I often want to make a note of a particularly well-written statement but don’t want to stop reading and of course then forget to go back and do so.  But there is one I jotted down when reading Chronicle that has stuck with me: “Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion.”  Just take a moment to think about that; it seems dangerously true to me and jumps uninvited into my head when I’m watching a TV show that I am deeply regretting.  It struck a (depressing) chord and I thought went nicely with my official FB quotation “Such contortions fatigue us” which I think I actually read in a Miss Manners column.


But I digress.  A few years ago, I read a review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the New York Times that stated Murakami does not plot his novels beforehand but lets the story reveal itself to him as he writes.  As I was reading his latest novel, 1Q84, I often felt that might be true of this endeavor as well.


1Q84 (the title is a play on the Japanese pronunciation of the year 1984; the letter Q and the number 9 are homophones in Japanese) takes place in 1984 and is obviously a homage to Orwell’s novel.  It focuses primarily on the story of Aomame and Tengo, a man and a woman who through various twists and turns find themselves living in an alternate reality, that is very similar to their usual Tokyo environment but with subtle (the policemen carry different weapons) and not-so subtle (the alternate Tokyo has two moons appearing in the sky) differences. The narrative shifts back and forth between the characters Tengo and Aomame and it becomes clear as the novel progresses (thorough almost 1000 pages) that they share many connections and as a matter of fact share a deep love for each other.  The complicated story involves cult religion, murder, love, family, Japanese culture and elements of fantasy, as I mentioned earlier.  Murakami is an astute observer of people and while the extreme detail can tend to bog the story down, I still enjoyed many of his observations and plot turns.


The writing has been criticized for being redundant and I have to agree with that.  Murakami seemed to feel the need to repeat many of the story elements several times; it made me wonder if he was doubtful of his skills as writer keeping control of the many paths the story took or our skills as readers in following those paths.  I found it also weird that often these redundancies were in BOLD print; ok, I get it!!!  Ironically, one of the observations the author made that impressed me is “if you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”   That made me stop and think:  I don't think this applies to seventh grade math, for example.  Often, explanation does lead to a "lightbulb" moment and understanding follows.  But I think Murakami is talking about understanding something on an emotional level; that type of understanding that occurs when a good friend is telling you how she feels about someone or some event that has caused great happiness or great sadness and you can truthfully say "I know; I get exactly what you mean. No explanation needed."  I feel that Murakami is a gifted writer and does present the reader with enough emotional insights into his characters to allow this type of understanding.  His belaboring of some elements in the story was distracting.


So…did the novel meet my expectations of a magnum opus, as 1Q84 was touted to be in Japan by some critics?  I would have to say no, but my expectations were very high.  I expected to be totally swept into another world and to love every minute of it.  Ultimately, there were too many unanswered questions about the Little People, the Dowager, the seventeen year old dyslexic author, the fate of the cult, and the search for a new Leader to “hear the voices.”  (No spoilers here!!!)  It was a rather “small” ending for such a complicated story.  It didn’t have the satisfying resolution of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and I missed that.  But I admire Murakami’s imagination and chutzpah; I love original stories and this one ranked highly in that arena.