"IQ84"
By Haruki Murakami
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, $14.99
BUY NOW
Like many of his previous books, Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84” begins with a descent through a portal. A woman, Aomame, finds herself in a traffic jam on Tokyo’s Inbound Expressway Number 3, the Czech composer Janáček’s “Sinfonietta” playing on her taxi’s curiously lush sound system. She’s late to something she can’t be late for — an assassination, though we don’t know that yet. Her taxi driver hesitates, then tells her about a turnout, and an emergency stairway. “Be careful,” he tells her. “Please remember: things are not what they seem.” Aomame removes her high heels and starts down the metal rungs, her clothes rustling in “the early April breeze, which swept her hair back now and then, revealing her malformed left ear.”
Murakami, we know by now, is an incorrigible ear fetishist. He’s also among the most attentive and omnivorous listeners in literature — hence the Janáček — and a loyal believer in worlds beyond this one. This, it emerges over 925 pages and three books (collected in one volume for the English language version, after being published in three parts in Japan), is what 1Q84 is — the name Aomame comes to give to the new world she’s descended into, where the police officers wear different uniforms, world history is just slightly different, and there are two moons hanging in the sky. The “Q,” Aomame decides, is for “question mark,” for that’s what 1Q84 is — “a world that bears a question.”
This is also an apt description of what fiction is, and among many other things, “1Q84” is about fiction — how it relates to what we understand to be “reality,” and how fiction can in fact change that reality, or even come to replace it. Aomame’s counterpart in Murakami’s alternating chapters is Tengo, a solitary 30-year-old, broad-shouldered man with gentle eyes, who teaches math at a cram school and writes stories in his spare time. Soon, an unscrupulous editor friend pulls Tengo into a plot to rewrite a rough but compelling manuscript by a mysterious 17-year-old girl named Eriko Fukada. The manuscript, “Air Chrysalis,” is set in a world just a bit beyond this one, populated by “Little People” who subtly manipulate the oblivious humans around them; at night, they spin cocoons out of silver threads they pick from the air. Two moons — the regular one and “a little green companion” — dot the “Air Chrysalis” sky.
The novel wins a prize, and becomes a best-seller. In one of many running meta-commentaries on the book inside the book that we are reading, Murakami even includes some reviews. “As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way, and it carries the reader along to the very end,” one critic writes. “But when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks.”
Murakami, as he well knows, could be describing his own book, down to the way it works — like an interlocking puzzle in which the book’s twin storylines rub against one another easily but only fully join with effort. Tengo, after publishing “Air Chrysalis,” finds that his world increasingly resembles that of the novel he’s just finished ghostwriting; right around the first time he notices what’s now duplicated above him in the sky, Aomame — keeping pace in her own set of adjacent chapters — looks up and sees the same thing. The two, we intuit long before we are told, are linked — by a past they once shared, and by an affection both have maintained since, though they haven’t seen each other in 20 years. “1Q84” is in the end a compact novel masquerading as a big one, a slim love story in baggy clothing.
And yet we’ve already left so much out — the usual virtuoso Murakami runs through jazz (Ellington, Holliday, Armstrong), literature (Chekhov, Shakespeare, McLuhan), cults (Sakigake, where the Little People and their human servants reside, seems to be based on Japan’s real-world Aum Shinrikyo cult) and sex, which shows up on nearly every page of “1Q84,” often in discomfiting detail. We hear about the tensile strength of Tengo’s erections and his mother’s graphic infidelities, the curve of 17-year-old Eriko Fukada’s breasts and Aomame’s wild foursomes. There’s also a wonderfully corrupt and benighted private eye, an ugly man with teeth like “seaside pilings that had been hit by huge waves,” who garners his own wrenching storyline, late in the book.
So why is “1Q84” ultimately such a disappointing novel? Part of it is the sense that the author of such deliriously surreal, romantic and hardboiled books as “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” “Norwegian Wood” and “A Wild Sheep Chase” is indeed sliding somewhere darker and unhappier, like Updike, with prose that clammily caresses various young and unclothed breasts, necks and other, less lovely body parts. Most of it is how ultimately bare Murakami’s story really is, beneath the book’s superstructure of riffs on modern religion, the intrusive and ambivalent role of the state (Tengo’s father, a former fee collector for the government, cannot stop knocking on doors, even on his deathbed), fiction’s relation to reality, and the human — in particular, male — penchant for cruelty. (Aomame, it turns out, is not just an assassin but a killer of men who abuse women.)
The meditative oddity that is Murakami’s signature loses some of its necessary strangeness at the length of something like “1Q84.” The book struggles not just with continuity — Tengo is either writing furiously or not writing at all, depending on the chapter — but with a certain repetitiveness, as first one character, and then another character, and then a third character learns and then processes the same piece of information.
To read, Murakami suggests, is to make a bargain. “We create the story,” Aomame muses toward the end of the novel, “and at the same time the story is what sets us in motion.” Novels are merely a variant on life itself; all of us live in fictions of our own making. But in order to do so, we first must believe — and that may be too much for a book as inconstant as “1Q84” to ask.
By Haruki Murakami
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, $14.99
BUY NOW
Like many of his previous books, Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84” begins with a descent through a portal. A woman, Aomame, finds herself in a traffic jam on Tokyo’s Inbound Expressway Number 3, the Czech composer Janáček’s “Sinfonietta” playing on her taxi’s curiously lush sound system. She’s late to something she can’t be late for — an assassination, though we don’t know that yet. Her taxi driver hesitates, then tells her about a turnout, and an emergency stairway. “Be careful,” he tells her. “Please remember: things are not what they seem.” Aomame removes her high heels and starts down the metal rungs, her clothes rustling in “the early April breeze, which swept her hair back now and then, revealing her malformed left ear.”
Murakami, we know by now, is an incorrigible ear fetishist. He’s also among the most attentive and omnivorous listeners in literature — hence the Janáček — and a loyal believer in worlds beyond this one. This, it emerges over 925 pages and three books (collected in one volume for the English language version, after being published in three parts in Japan), is what 1Q84 is — the name Aomame comes to give to the new world she’s descended into, where the police officers wear different uniforms, world history is just slightly different, and there are two moons hanging in the sky. The “Q,” Aomame decides, is for “question mark,” for that’s what 1Q84 is — “a world that bears a question.”
This is also an apt description of what fiction is, and among many other things, “1Q84” is about fiction — how it relates to what we understand to be “reality,” and how fiction can in fact change that reality, or even come to replace it. Aomame’s counterpart in Murakami’s alternating chapters is Tengo, a solitary 30-year-old, broad-shouldered man with gentle eyes, who teaches math at a cram school and writes stories in his spare time. Soon, an unscrupulous editor friend pulls Tengo into a plot to rewrite a rough but compelling manuscript by a mysterious 17-year-old girl named Eriko Fukada. The manuscript, “Air Chrysalis,” is set in a world just a bit beyond this one, populated by “Little People” who subtly manipulate the oblivious humans around them; at night, they spin cocoons out of silver threads they pick from the air. Two moons — the regular one and “a little green companion” — dot the “Air Chrysalis” sky.
The novel wins a prize, and becomes a best-seller. In one of many running meta-commentaries on the book inside the book that we are reading, Murakami even includes some reviews. “As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way, and it carries the reader along to the very end,” one critic writes. “But when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks.”
Murakami, as he well knows, could be describing his own book, down to the way it works — like an interlocking puzzle in which the book’s twin storylines rub against one another easily but only fully join with effort. Tengo, after publishing “Air Chrysalis,” finds that his world increasingly resembles that of the novel he’s just finished ghostwriting; right around the first time he notices what’s now duplicated above him in the sky, Aomame — keeping pace in her own set of adjacent chapters — looks up and sees the same thing. The two, we intuit long before we are told, are linked — by a past they once shared, and by an affection both have maintained since, though they haven’t seen each other in 20 years. “1Q84” is in the end a compact novel masquerading as a big one, a slim love story in baggy clothing.
And yet we’ve already left so much out — the usual virtuoso Murakami runs through jazz (Ellington, Holliday, Armstrong), literature (Chekhov, Shakespeare, McLuhan), cults (Sakigake, where the Little People and their human servants reside, seems to be based on Japan’s real-world Aum Shinrikyo cult) and sex, which shows up on nearly every page of “1Q84,” often in discomfiting detail. We hear about the tensile strength of Tengo’s erections and his mother’s graphic infidelities, the curve of 17-year-old Eriko Fukada’s breasts and Aomame’s wild foursomes. There’s also a wonderfully corrupt and benighted private eye, an ugly man with teeth like “seaside pilings that had been hit by huge waves,” who garners his own wrenching storyline, late in the book.
So why is “1Q84” ultimately such a disappointing novel? Part of it is the sense that the author of such deliriously surreal, romantic and hardboiled books as “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” “Norwegian Wood” and “A Wild Sheep Chase” is indeed sliding somewhere darker and unhappier, like Updike, with prose that clammily caresses various young and unclothed breasts, necks and other, less lovely body parts. Most of it is how ultimately bare Murakami’s story really is, beneath the book’s superstructure of riffs on modern religion, the intrusive and ambivalent role of the state (Tengo’s father, a former fee collector for the government, cannot stop knocking on doors, even on his deathbed), fiction’s relation to reality, and the human — in particular, male — penchant for cruelty. (Aomame, it turns out, is not just an assassin but a killer of men who abuse women.)
The meditative oddity that is Murakami’s signature loses some of its necessary strangeness at the length of something like “1Q84.” The book struggles not just with continuity — Tengo is either writing furiously or not writing at all, depending on the chapter — but with a certain repetitiveness, as first one character, and then another character, and then a third character learns and then processes the same piece of information.
To read, Murakami suggests, is to make a bargain. “We create the story,” Aomame muses toward the end of the novel, “and at the same time the story is what sets us in motion.” Novels are merely a variant on life itself; all of us live in fictions of our own making. But in order to do so, we first must believe — and that may be too much for a book as inconstant as “1Q84” to ask.
