1Q84



Yukio Mishima



My first exposure to Japanese literature was in January, 1973, when I picked up Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask at a bookstore in College Park, Maryland.  Subsequently I read a half-dozen more of his works, plus at least 3 of Yasunari Kawabata, and a handful of others.  In 1976, after landing in California, I decided to audit a course in Japanese lit at UC.  It was taught by a Japanese grad student on a Fulbright.  We became friends and, for a couple of years, housemates.  After post-doctoral work at Cambridge, he returned to Japan and assumed a professorship at Waseda University in Tokyo, his alma mater.  We continued to correspond and in 1989 he asked me if I had read a Japanese novelist who had attended Waseda with him as an undergraduate, and whose book had just been translated into English.  The author’s name was Haruki Murakami and the novel was A Wild Sheep Chase.  The book turned out to have little in common with any of the Japanese literature I’d read before.  A free-wheeling romp, it reminded me more of Tom Robbins than anything from Japan. 

That’s because Murakami is not really a Japanese writer in the sense that Mishima and Kawabata were, which is why the Japanese literary establishment has been less than welcoming to him.  Instead, he is a First World writer, a writer whose works are set not in traditional Japan, but rather on the western frontier of the American Empire, a place where people listen to European classical or American jazz or British pop music, watch American movies, read European and American literature, and have sensibilities more conditioned by those experiences than by the old traditions of Japanese culture.  Contextually, writers like Mishima and Kawabata were backward looking; Murakami accepts the present and looks forward.    



Haruki Murakami



A couple of years later a second novel was released in English, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.  This book was composed of two parallel narratives.  One takes place in a sci-fi version of Tokyo where a narrator (none of the characters have names) works at encrypting data in a laboratory hidden in the sewer system.  The other describes a self-contained world where a narrator reads dreams from the skulls of unicorns.  The two narratives gradually converge.  This book was darker and more dreamlike than the first, and even more bizarre and intriguing. 

When I told my friend how fascinating I’d found it, he mailed me Norwegian Wood, which was available in English in Japan at the time, but not yet in the US.  This was the book that made Murakami’s reputation in Japan, where it sold millions of copies (the film version is due out tomorrow in New York).  It turned out to be a realistic, straightforward, nostalgic story of romantic loss and regret, quite different from what I’d read before.  One could easily imagine it to be a semi-autobiographical novel based on his undergraduate days at Waseda. 

Since then I’ve read each of Murakami’s books as they’ve appeared in English, so it wasn’t surprising when his latest, 1Q84, showed up in my Christmas stocking.  At 925 pages, this is his most massive novel to date.  Like Hard-Boiled Wonderland, it is comprised of dueling narratives and alternate worlds, and like Norwegian Wood, it is a love story.  The lovers met when they were 10 years old.  At the time of the story, they are both 30, and haven’t seen each other in the 20 intervening years.  Nevertheless, they think of each other constantly, and the twin narratives, one of her path, one of his, describe the circuitous routes by which they gradually wend their ways toward one another.  Like Hard-Boiled Wonderland it has elements of a detective story, and like Norwegian Wood it is a nostalgic and sentimental love story.  These are the two sides of Murakami. 

1Q84, in homage to George Orwell, is set in 1984 or, rather, in an alternative to 1984, the “Q” being a phonetic play on the Japanese word for “nine.”  Alienation and loneliness have always been prominent themes in Murakami and 1Q84 is no exception, with both protagonists being, for the most part, socially isolated.  Conversely, social consciousness has never played a big role in Murakami’s fiction, but 1Q84 breaks with that by giving considerable attention to the issue of the abuse of women.  The real charm of 1Q84 though is that it’s an elaborate adult fairy tale.  It even has fairies, called “the Little People.”  By virtue of this it transports us back to our own childhoods, and the stories we heard as children.  In the process it returns to the basics of storytelling: spinning a good yarn.  Looked at in retrospect, there are some problems with the plot and, despite all the surprises along the way (and there are plenty of those), the ending is predictable.  It’s the only possible ending, of course, for a fairy tale.  Nonetheless the book is captivating.  Murakami sets up resonances between the characters, their words and their actions, that keep you both bemused and amused in a world where, as in a child’s world, anything seems possible. In a way, the book is a celebration of the playful creativity of childhood.  And though a couple of them may seem a little too easy, the echoing of actions, characters, and, ultimately, of worlds, feels full of imports that are just out of reach.