CY@CY Says Welcome to my dreamscape. Where a Lim is also a Ling.
Haruki Murakami is one of the most popular authors in the world today, having been honoured with the Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the World Fantasy Award. The publication of the English translation of Murakami’s 1Q84 was the most anticipated literary event of 2011, with midnight openings, queues around the block, magazine covers and unprecedented pre-orders. The original Japanese version of 1Q84 sold 1.5 million copies in its first month after publication in Japan in 2009.
Murakami’s “1Q84” is an immensely long book that showcases the author’s preternatural gift for suspenseful storytelling in a genre known as magical realism. My copy of this novel is 1318 pages long so I started reading it with some trepidation, wondering whether I had the patience to read such a long novel. Surprisingly, I find the novel quite engrossing though I have never been a fan of fantasy novels.
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
When “1Q84” opens, a young woman gym instructor named Aomame finds herself stuck in gridlock on Tokyo’s elevated Metropolitan Expressway while on her way to an important appointment – to kill a wife-beating oil broker with an ice pick. She moonlights as an assassin of men who are guilty of brutal violence against women upon instructions from a wealthy old lady known as the Dowager. The taxi driver mentions that there’s an emergency service stairway nearby that leads down to a street close to a subway stop. As Aomame opens the door of the cab to get to the emergency stairway, the driver mysteriously says: “Don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”
By the time Aomame reaches a deluxe hotel for her appointment, she begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She realises that the world has switched tracks and she is no longer in 1984 but has entered a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q” is for ‘question mark.’
Meanwhile, a Maths teacher and aspiring writer named Tengo, against his better judgement, has been talked into rewriting a short novel called “Air Chrysalis” that has been submitted for a literary award by a 17-year-old girl named Fuka-Eri. The young girl has fled a religious cult community known as Sakigake and the novel was about her experience in the community. The rewritten novel wins the prize and becomes a bestseller, making the young girl famous overnight. But she can hardly write and her speech is unnaturally clipped and laconic. It becomes tough for Tengo to keep the fraud secret.
Slowly, unknowingly, Aomame and Tengo, who were classmates when they were 10 year old, work their way toward each other. They have each carried a torch for the other for almost 20 years and have never met since they were 10.
There are several interesting characters besides Aomame and Tengo: the immensely wealthy Dowager who has founded an organization to help battered wives; Dowager’s gay bodyguard of the utmost efficiency; a deformed lawyer of dogged determination and razorlike intelligence; a young policewoman with a penchant for rough sex; Tengo’s dying father, who has spent his life going door to door as a collection agent; and, not least, the leader of the Sakigake cult who rapes — or perhaps is raped by — pre-pubescent girls.
1Q84 features religious cults, an immaculate conception, telekinesis, transmigrating souls and quite a fair bit of sex scenes. It is an oddball yarn that is part crime drama, part love story, part fantasy, part dystopia and part hallucinatory riff on 1984, George Orwell’s fable about totalitarianism and mind-control.
For me, there are moments where I wonder if the novel really needs to be so long. Despite that, I still find myself turning the pages, captivated by the story.