leaving the cat town

I finished reading Haruki Murakami's book 1Q84 yesterday. I was sick all weekend, God knows when I'd actually have finished it otherwise. If you can make it through all 900 pages, it's a good read. If you want to read the book unspoiled, you ought to stop reading this post now.

The dust cover claims that 1Q84 is about all sorts of characters: a wealthy dowager, an ugly private detective, a polite bodyguard, an abused seventeen-year-old girl and so on. It's not, though. It's actually about only two people named Tengo and Aomame, who were once elementary school classmates and who are now searching for each other after a twenty-year absence. They were only classmates for a short time, and now that I think about it, I don't think they even had a single conversation before the twenty-year gap.

In other words, it's the perfect, archetypal Murakami romance.

The year 1Q84 exists in a world slightly forked off of 1984 Japan. Tengo and Aomame enter this world separately and a few other people are pulled in as well. Most of the world is unaware that this forking has happened at all. Tengo is pulled in when he agrees to secretly rewrite/ghostwrite a novella called Air Chrysalis, which is supposedly a fictional work by a young author but turns out to be a too-accurate story about the Little People -- the fantastical antagonists of 1Q84. Aomame accidentally enters the year 1Q84 as she sets out to murder an abusive husband (not hers) and is later tasked to kill the leader of Sakigake, a religious group which worships the Little People.

The antagonists are described and defined more clearly in 1Q84 than in any other Murakami work I can remember reading. In other books it's always been some mysterious disappearance in the moonlight, or at most some dead figure from the past. Something more internal than external, usually. I think that Murakami leaves this in an unfortunate middle ground -- the Little People and the religious organization that follows them are tangible enough to invite scrutiny and curiosity, but not fleshed-out enough to have real substance. More generally speaking, Murakami has always excelled at creating a conflict that embodies some intrinsic and inescapable quality of the hero (say, Sumire's need for a different Miu, or Kafka's feeling of abandonment). In 1Q84, there are some internal conflicts and some external ones, but they seem much less connected than ever before. When Tengo and Aomame escape 1Q84, it's as easy as climbing over a highway barricade -- a simple material action.

I do think that 1Q84 represents an expansion in Murakami's scope in some pleasant directions as well. The relationships are less one-sided, the danger more real and present. He experiments with multiple perspectives, including a female protagonist's. Of course, he hits all the old notes I've come to expect: wistfulness, a sense of wonder and the need for closure and reconciliation. And -- is this another Murakami first? -- in the year 1Q84, it's not too late for our heroes to find these things.