Just last night I finished Haruki Murakami's epochal, mind-blowing 1Q84 and must confess that I find it very daunting to try to write about in this space. Murakami is probably Japan's best-known author; his writing has special appeal to Westerners because so much of his frame of reference is European or American (for example cars, clothing styles, music) making it a bit easier to enter his unique world.
Until now, his "big" book — in all senses — was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a wonderful novel first published in English translation in 1997. While it can hardly be said that it is in any sense superseded by the new book — it certainly remains as wonderful as ever — 1Q84 is so large, so ambitious and so brilliant that it simply must dominate any discussion of Murakami's oeuvre from here on.
As in some of his other work (such as his most recent novel Kafka on the Shore and the earlier Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) Murakami tells two stories in alternating chapters and then weaves them together in the course of the book. Each chapter is identified with the names of one or the other of the main characters: a man named Tengo and a woman named Aomame. Each is about thirty years old and living a fairly lonely (but not unhappy) existence in Tokyo; the year is 1984. The two of them had actually been in the same elementary school class when they were ten years old and made a lasting impression, although they have had no contact for the intervening twenty years and indeed have no knowledge of each other's existence.
There is also a "thriller" aspect to the book, in that there are some murders and there is a detective named Ushikawa (who gets a chapter of his own added to the rotation), a sinister character who becomes entangled with the two main characters, and there is genuine excitement as he stalks his prey.
So: a love story, an adventure story, a fantasy, a thriller, with wonderful characters and situations, but with all this I don't think I am doing the book justice because I am not mentioning its wonderful literary and musical references (there is a kind of Leitmotif of references to Janácek's Sinfonietta, for example), nor its also wonderful down-to-earth qualities, the mundane circumstances of the characters' existences.
To me there was also very much an operatic quality to the sweep of the book, its ability to encompass an entire universe fully worthy of Wagner in the “Ring” (another work in which the lovers have a pre-history before they meet in the flesh), but also the purification ritual that Tamino and Pamina must undergo before they can escape the dangerous magic of the Queen of the Night and unite with each other in Mozart's “Magic Flute.”
But there is something more than even these aspects: above all Murakami seems to be insisting on the ability of fiction — its power, its freedom — to do anything, to defy logic, to redefine reality. This is a triumph of the free imagination.
And have I mentioned the brilliance of the writing?
I think the point here is run, don't walk, to get this book and experience it yourself. Yes, it is more than 900 pages but when I finished it I was sorry there wasn't more.
— Jeremy Nussbaum
