(Harvill Secker, £20 / £14.99 stg hardback)
Task: review 63-year-old Japanese novelist’s new 1300
page three volume opus in 700 words, outlining the plot, introducing the main
characters, and giving your considered appraisal, in the overall context of his
oeuvre. Okay, here goes.
At heart this
picaresque novel has quite a simple narrative arc: boy and girl meet; they fall
in love; they lose each other; they find each other again. However, this story
line comes freighted with several extravagantly serpentine and surreally
bizarre add-ons.
Set in Tokyo
over eight months in 1984, the first two books alternate between the
perspectives of that now adult boy, Tengo, a portly maths tutor who secretly
agrees to rewrite 17-year-old girl Fuka-Eri’s addictive but inelegantly written
novella about a commune of leprechauns, which is then submitted for the
prestigious Akutagawa Prize, wins it, and becomes a bestseller; and that now
grown-up girl, Aomane, whose embarrassing running joke name literally
translates as ‘Green Bean’, a female gym instructor who, with a touch of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, avenges
victims of domestic violence. Angry at the suicide of a childhood
friend who married a brute, she carries out assassinations on behalf of The
Dowager, a widow in charge of a women’s refuge.
Like much
of Pynchon, nearly all Murakami's novels play with the device of a parallel
universe into which characters can slip through cracks or portals, and here
Aomane, stuck in a traffic jam while on her way to kill a wife-beating oil
broker with an ice pick, abandons her taxi and descends an emergency staircase
leading down from a city expressway to find things aren’t quite the same. Seeing
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 dimension, which she christens 1Q84. The ‘Q’ may stand for
‘Question’, although the title is also a pun on Orwell’s own dystopia, playing
on the identical pronunciation of the Japanese number ‘nine’ and the English
letter ‘Q’.
Meanwhile
Fuka-Eri, it transpires, has fled a religious commune resembling the Aum
Shinrikyo cult, which carried out the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in
1995, and about which Murakami has written previously in 2000’s nonfiction Underground, arguing that the attack
should not be dismissed as the madness of a tiny brainwashed minority, but
rather symptomatic of the problems of mainstream Japanese society.
The various
plot strands being to interconnect because the leader of Fuka-Eri’s Sakigake
cult is suspected of raping young girls, and when a distraught 10-year-old
turns up at the women’s refuge, Aomane gets a new mission. Also, the success of
Fuka-Eri’s novella makes it increasingly difficult for Tengo to keep his
ghostwriting fraud a secret. Add to all this the fact that the work of the
Little People is not confined to Fuka-Eri’s little book, but starts appearing
in the world of 1Q84 as well. But the
chief connecting thread is the love between the male and female leads. As
10-year-old classmates, they briefly held hands. Two decades later, Aomane
tells a friend that she has never loved anyone expect this long lost boy. Her
confidante responds: “If it were me, I’d do everything I could to locate
him.”
Book Three was
published a year after the previous instalments in Japan, and may feel like a
bit of a letdown, depending as it does on synopsis and recapitulation. It
shifts to a third point-of-view in the shape of Ushikawa, a repulsive private
detective on the hunt for Aomame, whose pursuit of his prey can seem like an
excuse to summarise what preceded it. It does, however, contain the tactful but
moving finale, where Tengo and Aomane are reunited in a playground.
If all of the
above interests you, but you are wary of wading into a tome of such epic
proportions (‘Who has time to read fiction of this length, given the busy
modern lifestyles of this day and age?’ etc.), you might like to try ‘Town of
Cats’, a stand-alone sampler which first appeared in The New Yorker as a discrete short story rather than an extract,
but has now, with a few minor amendations, been fully incorporated into 1Q84.
Recounting a day when Tengo visits his dementia-suffering father, whom
he hasn’t seen in years and whose paternity he ultimately doubts, it is as
bleakly uncanny as anything in Kafka, but tells some very human truths. Of its
nature, it is also shorter than the bracing journey of 1Q84.
First
published in The Sunday Independent.
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