Murakami works familiar themes in 1Q84

1Q84

By Haruki Murakami

Knopf, $30.50; 925 pp.

This is an enormous book, long enough to be more than one book. In fact, when it was originally released in Murakami’s native Japan, it was published as three books. That might have been a better way to market it in the U.S. As it is, the book weighs close to three pounds and presents readers with a task somewhat akin to sitting down and reading the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy back-to-back-to-back. It’s daunting.

Murakami’s loyal legion of readers will persevere, however, and there are enough of them to catapult this book onto best-seller lists and keep it there. What is the attraction? When you begin the story, told in the alternating voices of Aomame and Tengo, it’s 1984 as in Orwell’s novel of change.

Aomame (Green Peas in Japanese) is a slim 20-something, very attractive if not beautiful woman, whose athleticism and fearlessness has led her into an unusual line of work: she’s an assassin. She is a special kind of assassin whose mode of dispatching her victims is unique. She uses a special weapon, “something like a small ice pick about four inches in length with a compact wooden handle. It looked like an ice pick, but it was not meant for cracking ice. Aomame had designed and made it herself. The tip was sharp and pointed as a needle, and it was protected from breakage by a small piece of cork — cork that had been specially processed to make it as soft as cotton.” Posing as a masseuse (which she really is), Aomame gets her victims (all male) to relax, then using her sensitive fingers, she finds a special spot on the back of their necks. “Once she had settled on the location and set her mind to the task, Aomame raised her right palm in the air, held her breath, and, after a brief pause, brought it straight down — not too forcefully — against the wooden handle. If she applied too much force, the needle might break under the skin, and leaving the needle behind was out of the question. The important thing was to bring the palm down lightly, almost tenderly, at the exact right angle with exactly the right amount of force, without resisting gravity, straight down, as if the fine point of the needle were being sucked into the spot with the utmost naturalness — deeply, smoothly, and with fatal results.”

The method results in instantaneous death and leaves virtually no trace. The death looks like a natural one.

Tengo is a writer, about 30. But he is also a math teacher at a “cram school.” He’s a big guy, tall and husky, ruggedly handsome. He lives alone and writes. One day his publisher approaches him with a proposition. A teenage girl has written a great novel, but it needs to be rewritten. The publisher doesn’t want the girl to rewrite the book. He wants Tengo to secretly do it. Somehow the publisher knows it will be a perfect collaboration that will produce a great literary prize for the author, 17-year-old Fuka-Eri — as long as no one ever learns it has been rewritten by another author. Tengo reads the book, Air Chrysalis, and is enthralled. It is a fantastic story that involves a young female heroine who lives in a compound of a religious cult.

When she fails to tend a pet goat, the animal dies and she is locked in a storage shed with the carcass as punishment. As soon as it’s dark, mystical beings from another dimension emerge from the dead animal’s mouth. The heroine watches the tiny beings enter her world and learns their secrets. She calls them the “Little People.”

Tengo agrees to do the rewrite, but first meets the beautiful Fuka-Eri (Eriko Fukada), the author. She agrees to the scheme. As he reads the book, Tengo is haunted by a growing sense that the story is not fiction but rather the retelling of events that the writer actually witnessed. He asks Fuka-Eri about the vividness of the narrative.

“The Little People really exist,” she tells him.

Meanwhile, Aomame is on her way to do a “job,” but gets stuck in a big traffic jam. She can’t be late. In desperation, she leaves her taxi and climbs down a freeway emergency exit, a concrete stairwell something like a well. She goes and does the job but then realizes that things are “different.” Her first clue is the kind of guns policemen carry. They’re all toting the latest automatic pistols, but Aomame is sure they had been carrying revolvers only a few days before. Yet when she inquires, she learns they have been carrying the new kind of guns for “some time.”

Little things begin to add up, so that Aomame gradually realizes she’s entered another dimension, very like the one she used to live in, but not exactly the same. For one thing, there are two moons in the sky at night. She calls this new world “1Q84,” the Q signifying “question.” Tengo too has slipped into another dimension, his transportation initially triggered by his rewriting of Air Crysalis.

The expected hallmarks of Murakami stories are there: subplots, mysticism, talking cats, mirrors (the book’s page numbers are printed in reverse on one side), parallel dimensions, internal monologue, alternating first-person narrators and third person omniscient narrator. Sometimes it seems like Murakami has written this novel after a long drinking bout with David Lynch and Stephen King. Except neither of those people can write like Murakami.

“Although the rainy season had not been declared officially over, the Tokyo sky was intensely blue and the midsummer sun beat down on the earth. With their newly thickened burden of green leaves, the willows once again cast dense, trembling shadows on the street.”

Now that is lovely. And in the midst of all the mystical happenings, there is a love story and considerable sex. It turns out that Aomame and Tengo went to elementary school together and forged a brief but enduring bond that drives them toward one another no matter what dimension they inhabit. Murakami exploits this storyline to maintain tension, but he also is careful to reveal other parts of his plot a bit at a time, so that the more the reader learns, the more they want to know.

It’s really hard to explain the appeal of Murakami’s books. They have strange plots, mystical things happen and not everything is explained. Some questions go unanswered. One thing that marks a great writer is the haunting nature of his work. That’s how Murakami’s books are: even after you finish them, you will find yourself thinking about them. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle remains his greatest work, but the 1Q84 trilogy is a close second. It’s worth the effort to wade through it, and besides, you have to find out if Aomame and Tengo will find each other.