By Ted Gioia In the opening pages of 1Q84 , Aomame is rushing to make an appointment. Her taxi is stuck in a traffic jam on a Tokyo expressway. The driver explains that her only chance to get to her meeting on time is to leave the car and climb down an emergency staircase by the side of the motorway. From there, she can take a subway to her destination.
Aomame follows his advice, but her trip down the dilapidated steps turns into a more momentous journey than she could have anticipated. It brings her to an alternative universe—a strange, transformed Tokyo with a different history and unfamiliar laws. The most distinguishing characteristic: a second moon in the sky, a green and misshapen companion to the familiar orb in the heavens. Forced to confront this strange state of affairs, Aomame names her new world 1Q84—a variant of the 1984 she left behind in the taxi, as well as a nod of the hat at a famous novel by George Orwell. "Q is for 'question mark'," she tells herself, "a world that bears a question….The air has changed. The scene has changed. I have to adapt to this world-with-a- question-mark as soon as I can."
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Murakami develops this story over the course of chapters that alternate with interludes from a different narrative—an account of an aspiring writer named Tengo Kawana, who has undertaken to revise a bizarre novella by a seventeen-year-old girl. The manuscript, entitled Air Chyrsalis , is an apparent work of magical realism about a strange world, populated by "little people," whose most distinguishing characteristic is —yes, you guessed it—a second moon in the sky.
These two narratives eventually converge and overlap. Along the way, Murakami periodically sprinkles additional elements of the mystical and fantastic into his narrative. Readers encounter a pregnancy without intercourse, a man who can be in two places at the same time, people hatched out of cocoons, each of these oddities presented—as is typical with this author—without the slightest attempt at logical explanation or scientific rationale. Murakami is more interested in the mystery than in its solution, and like a stage magician aims to astonish rather than inform.
But don’t be misled by my list of fantastical elements in this novel. Murakami adheres to intense realism and plausibility throughout most of this novel. If you peel away the magical and inexplicable aspects at play here, you are left with a intense crime thriller….and a touching romance….and a coming-of-age story… as well as a philosophical novel about religious belief and the conflict between secular and spiritual values in daily life. The marvel of 1Q84 may, ultimately, have less to do with "little people" and multiple moons, and more with Murakami's ability to put so many disparate elements into this book, and yet make them cohere.
Aomame's urgent appointment, we soon learn, is to meet a man she's never seen before, and murder him with a deadly poison. She is working with a wealthy dowager to identify and exact revenge on men who have committed extreme acts of domestic abuse. Aomame is a tough operator—there is more than a small dose of Lisbeth Salander in her—skilled in martial arts and capable of surprising ruthlessness in pursuit of her goals. Yet she has a tender spot in her heart for the love of her life—Tengo Kawana, the ghost writer whose story fills the alternate chapters in 1Q84 —even though she hasn't seen him for 20 years, and their last meeting took place when both were ten years old.
Tengo also has a secret passion for Aomame, kindled in his heart over the last two decades. But he too is caught up in a dangerous drama. His work in completing and publishing the novel Air Chrysalis has irritated a powerful religious cult, whose leaders believe that the book has released vital secrets into the public domain. Tengo gradually realizes that the magical environment he described in the novel might be all too real, and that the fairy-like "little people" described in Air Chrysalis may have become his ardent enemies.
Those who have read Murakami's previous novels will be familiar with the strange sense of isolation and anomie that often surrounds his major characters— who invariably find themselves in the bottom of a well or in a deep hole or some other strange, secluded place. In 1Q84 , Murakami takes this stylistic quirk to an extreme. Every one of the key characters in this novel ends up in hiding or seclusion at some point in the narrative. Some stay inside an apartment and refuse to answer when anyone comes knocking at the door. Others are (take your choice): (1) held captive in a small room, (2) in a coma, (3) hiding out on a surveillance mission, (4) isolated in a darkened chamber to avoid sunlight, (5) inaccessible in a religious retreat, (5) locked in a storage area with a dead goat…and so on and so forth. Much of the distinctive flavor of Murakami's book comes from the cumulative impact of these quasi-solipsistic character quirks and plot twists. Even in the midst of densely populated Tokyo, with its hustle and bustle, the actors in 1Q84 seem enclosed in a profound, unbridgeable psychological space. And though Murakami has a fondness for dream sequences—a narrative device that I usually dislike—he achieves something even more striking by imparting a quality of a feverish night delusion even to his characters' waking hours.
The end result is one of the strangest novels I have read in recent years, yet also one of the most captivating. I have elsewhere suggested that a leading movement in contemporary fiction—indeed, perhaps the most salient trend in the novel of the new millennium—has been to reconceptualize our sense of reality. Where earlier cutting-edge authors experimented with phrases and sentence structures, seeking liberation through language, many of today's most interesting writers don’t try to alter syntax but tinker with our very understanding of the world itself. Murakami is one of the leaders of this movement— along with writers such as Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Mitchell, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, and others. In 1Q84 , he makes this all the more clear, further enhancing his already lofty reputation, and delivering a novel as unsettling and unique as the alternate world it describes.