“Principles and logic didn’t give birth to reality,” reflects a man named Ushikawa, a disreputable figure who nonetheless observes his surroundings with a certain tarnished clarity. With “1Q84,” however, Murakami evokes a fully articulated vision of a not-quite-nightmare world, in which reality goes its own way and we have no choice but to adapt. Novels such as “A Wild Sheep Chase” (1989) or “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” (1997) come off as 21/2 dimensional, as if they don’t quite have a fully nuanced sense of life. Make no mistake - this is a major development in Murakami’s writing while I’ve generally enjoyed his books, only a few transcend a trademark mix of contemporary rootlessness, pop culture riffing and what I’ve come to think of as magical realism lite. Such issues have often marked Murakami’s fiction, most vividly perhaps in the densely beautiful “Kafka on the Shore” (2005) or the understated stories of 2002’s “After the Quake.” Yet in both heft and scope, in its sense of metaphysics and of metafiction, “1Q84” takes things several levels deeper, aspiring to more density, more depth of emotion, and for the most part pulling it off.
I guarantee you that.”įor Murakami, such a statement establishes the stakes of “1Q84,” framing it as no mere fantasy but rather a multilayered narrative of loyalty and loss.
This is no imitation world, no imaginary world, no metaphysical world. Deaths caused in this world are real deaths. The pain one feels in this world is real pain. But this is the real world, there is no doubt about that. “What it is, is a metaphysical proposition. “What the real world is: that is a very difficult problem,” a character known as Leader explains in the exact center of the novel. Indeed, that’s the point of “1Q84,” which takes place in a world much like this one but tweaked slightly: less an entirely alternate universe than a variant. You want to get up from these pages feeling groggy, as if you’ve been wrenched out of everyday experience, drawn into a landscape where the boundary between reality and imagination has been rendered moot. Still, there’s something about the book that requires the deep immersion, the otherworldly sense of connection/disconnection, that only an extended plunge allows. It won’t be easy - the novel clocks in at 926 pages and is often densely allusive, if readable throughout.
Here’s an unorthodox suggestion: Try to read Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84” in as close to a single sitting as you can. Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel
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