Book review: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

1Q84 is a big book. Unfortunately, it is big more in terms of size than effect, and most of its nearly 1,000 pages are scaffolding set up around what is at heart a very simple story. This diconnect between size and significance is the primary difference between Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's latest novel and George Orwell's 1984, a book that is alluded to in the title 1Q84 and which, fleetingly, makes several appearances in the text. At about 370 pages, Orwell's classic novel is a small book that has had a huge impact on international literary and social culture. 1Q84 is not destined to do the same. Murakami is certainly a major contemporary novelist, and his books are international publishing events. Originally appearing in three volumes in Japan beginning in 2009, the English translation of 1Q84 was recently published in one volume, and caused a furor in Anglo-American letters that was followed, like clockwork, with a backlash, owing to the fact that 1Q84 is rambling, slow-paced and shallow in its treatment of the dream world it conjures. The novel is split between two protagonists, Aomame, a young fitness instructor and hired assassin, and Tengo, an aspiring novelist. There is an important connection between them, but Murakami is slow to clarify exactly what that is. One thing is certain: The two characters are drawn together as Tengo is persuaded by his publisher to act as a ghostwriter to polish a manuscript he has recently received, Air Chrysalis, dealing with an imaginary world in which there are two moons and mystical "Little People" who can commune between our world and theirs. As it transpires, Air Chrysalis actually tells the story of Sakigake, a cultish religious group whose leader Aomame is eventually contracted to kill. Thus begins the strange interweaving of Tengo and Aomame's separate lives and so too the interference by the imaginary world of Air Chrysalis with the real world in which our protagonists live, causing Aomame to dub the world in which she finds herself 1Q84, rather than the true year, 1984, as the "Q" stands for "question," and because Q is a homophone for the number nine in Japanese. One of Murakami's fundamental themes as a novelist is loneliness and the existential quest to abate that loneliness by forging connections with other human beings. That theme is also at the center of 1Q84. Take away all the references to Little People, air chrysalises and two moons, and the novel is essentially the tale of two star-crossed lovers seeking to reunite after two decades. Unfortunately, the connection between Aomame and Tengo is so lightly drawn it is neither fully convincing nor of great consequence - not a good situation for the central characters and relationship in such a long novel. If one accepts the conjecture that 1Q84 is at its heart a simple love story, the questions, of course, come unrelentingly: How many of the nearly 1,000 pages are necessary? Do the science-fiction elements of the novel help Murakami tell his story or hinder him? What about the banal repetition, where whole sentences are repeated, both in dialogue and descriptions? One is tempted to draw parallels between 1Q84 and Proust's In Search of Lost Time, another novel that is mentioned explicitly in 1Q84, as Aomame reads it while she is held up in a safe house. But in Proust, one gets the impression that no sentence is wasted - or, at least, not too many of them; one feels Proust truly needed all of those pages to spin his yarn. And, of course, the most sumptuous passages in Proust more than make up for any stretches of less-than-stellar prose. That is not the case with 1Q84. Generally, the book, and especially the last third of it, is meandering, if not static. Murakami knows how to keep the reader in suspense, and his chapters, which alternate point of view between Tengo and Aomame, often end just before a decisive moment, keeping the reader charged to plow through the next chapter to see what has happened. But Murakami's language is too spare - one is tempted to say banal - to be revelatory in the manner of Proust, and his story is neither complex enough nor deep enough to merit anything close to 1,000 pages. That is not to say the story told in 1Q84 is banal. It is, if not complex, exactly, at least imaginative, as Murakami has created a meta-narrative wherein a supposedly fictional world comes to life, or rather, two protagonists accidentally enter an alternative world. Problematically, however, Murakami doesn't bother to pin down the details of this world, or why and how Tengo and Aomame have entered it, and thus we are left to trust him, with the aid of only the sparest clues as to the depth of this world and its inhabitants. The Little People, for example, who are supposedly infinitely wise, never say much more than "Ho ho." Complete disclosure is not a prerequisite for fiction, of course, and certainly not for the soft surrealism in which Murakami trades. But a novel of this girth demands some semblance of, if not disclosure - not to mention closure - at least an explanation of its raison d'etre. This does not happen in 1Q84, and thus readers will be left unfulfilled, even disappointed, by the commitment required to finish a book that from afar appears to be an elaborately crafted satellite but is in fact little more than a hot-air balloon.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com