An attractive woman steps out of a cab in the middle of a congested highway. It was the year 1984. Janacek’s Sinfonietta was playing through the exquisite stereos of the taxi. She adjusts her skirt and takes the first step over the barrier. Down a flight of emergency stairs she goes, with me in tow, into Murakami’s fictional world of 1Q84.
The book shifts between the perspectives of Aomame, a fitness club instructor who is also a deadly assassin, and Tengo Kawana, a cram-school teacher and aspiring writer, following them as they find each other in the parallel universe Aomame calls 1Q84. The Q stands for “question mark” (kyu also being the Japanese word for 9), and like its namesake, the book left me with more questions than answers. With copious amounts of pages devoted to elaborations of the most trivial sort, multiple references to the likes of Proust and Orwell without apparent reason, and deviant sexual fantasies one could only expect from a Japanese writer, I couldn’t help but wonder if they contain some deeper meaning. After reading through chapters and chapters about nothing in particular, though, I gave up mulling over them; a quick online search told me I wasn’t alone in this.
Yet I am going to go out on a limb and say that this might be the best novel I have read so far. At 925 pages long, it demands a lot of spare time on the reader’s part - especially when Murakami doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to finish. Despite this, the numerous digressions were surprisingly welcome, fitting perfectly into a story that would’ve felt empty otherwise. In a world with “Little People” and a Tokyo with two moons, the writer deftly maintains an unexaggerated treatment of these fantastical elements, resulting in a dreamlike effect with characters that still feel vividly real.
I found that the key to reading this book is not to overthink; for what could be more powerful than the ability of the written word to intrigue and amaze? A simple story about a woman and a man, pulled towards each other in a world with two moons. In the hands of a master, the result is breathtaking.
Murakami uses some epic similes. Here are my favourites:
“There were a lot of questions but not many answers, like a trade imbalance.”
“The more I think about it, the less I seem to understand, like my brain is a tub of tofu past its expiration date.”
Special mention also goes to the U.S. edition cover design (which was simply beautiful) and the fact that alternate page numbers are reflected, as if read through a mirror. The amount of detail that went into the book is stunning.
