A story of epic proportions by one of the world’s great writers, 1Q84 is an engrossing read despite its size. Though it contains many tropes readers associate with Murakami, a tone of mystery and ultimate unknowability is maintained throughout. The reader is left satisfied with being taken on a fantastical journey yet left to ponder what else to novel has to say or has left unsaid.

Aomame, a young woman in 1984 Tokyo, is in danger of being late for a meeting. Her taxi is stuck in traffic. Her driver concedes she is not likely to make her appointment. He has a suggestion though, if she is game to try it. It is a little-known fact that expressways have emergency stairways. The expressway they are passing has one such stairway within a short walking distance. Taking his advice, Aomame leaves her cab and walks through the stalled traffic to the expressway while everyone stuck in their cars watch her go.

“And also,” the driver said, facing the mirror, “Please remember: things are not what they seem.”

Things are not what they seem, Aomame repeated mentally. “What do you mean by that?” she asked with knitted brows.

The driver chose his words carefully: “it’s just that you’re about to do something out of the ordinary. Am I right? People do not ordinarily climb down the emergency stairs of the Metropolitan Expressway in the middle of the day especially women.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Right. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. I’ve had that experience myself. But don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”

Aomame – a strange name that means ‘green peas’ – arrives at her destination, a hotel. She goes up to a room and knocks on the door. She tells the man who answers that she is a member of staff come to check the air conditioner. Though annoyed, the man lets her in. Aomame makes her check, taking in the hotel room as she does so. Just as she is about to leave, she tells the man he has something on the back of his neck. With his back turned, Aomame plunges a fine needle into his neck, killing him instantly and leaving no trace.

She could hear her heart beating. And in her head, in time with the beat, resounded the opening fanfare of Janáĉek’s Sinfonietta. Soft, silent breezes played across the green meadows of Bohemia. She was aware that she had become split into. Half of her continued to press the dead man’s neck with utter coolness. The other half was filled with fear. She wanted to drop everything and get out of this room now. I’m here, but I’m not here. I’m in two places at once. It goes against Einstein’s theorem, but what the hell. Call it the Zen of the killer.

The next day, Aomame arrives at Willow House; a mansion and estate in a discreet location, safe from prying eyes. Greeted and let in by a security guard, Aomame meets the elderly dowager in her hothouse where she keeps exotic butterflies. Over tea and biscuits, Aomame and the dowager talk in code about the man who unfortunately died of a sudden heart attack in his hotel room yesterday.

The dowager uses her mansion for women escaping abuse. In a patriarchal society, men rarely face justice for abusing women, divorce is difficult and men can avoid their alimony responsibilities. The dowager hands Aomame pictures of the dead man’s wife who was repeatedly raped and beaten by him in one of the worst cases the dowager has seen. Though she rarely uses Aomame’s services, in certain cases it is called for. ‘We did the right thing,’ the dowager keeps repeating.

While Aomame was on the way to her hotel rendezvous, elsewhere in Tokyo, Tengo is also on his way to a meeting. A young man, Tengo lives a quiet, efficient life that minimises his stress while also providing the basic level of comfort he needs. He works a low stress job as a math tutor in a cram school. It does not pay a lot but is sufficient for his small apartment where he cooks quick, small, healthy meals. He has no real friends or girlfriend but is having an affair with a married woman ten years his senior, which is as fulfilling as he requires without any unwanted commitment. Tengo’s real passion is reading and writing. Though he has attempted a few novels he has not succeeded in making a living as a writer.

The meeting Tengo is heading to is with Komatsu, his editor. Komatsu has handed Tengo an unpublished novel – Air Chrysalis by Fuka-Eri – which is being considered for a new writer’s prize. Tengo and Komatsu agree the writing is poor but the story is incredible. Tengo doubts the novel would win the prize but submitting it would give the writer needed encouragement. Komatsu disagrees; he does not think the writer has another novel in them. Instead, Komatsu has more daring suggestion. Komatsu proposes that Tengo rewrites Air Chrysalis, ironing out its flaws and they submit it for a far more prestigious prize, one where a polished version may stand to win. Tengo, Komatsu and Fuka-Eri would then split the not-inconsiderable prize money between them.

Tengo is not onboard. The money does not matter to him and he finds the plan wholly unethical. But Komatsu suspects he will come around.

Komatsu pulled out another cigarette and lit it. “You’re absolutely right. It is risky. There are a few too many uncertainties at this point in time. One slip, and things could get very unpleasant for us. I’m perfectly aware of that. But you know, Tengo, taking everything into consideration, my instincts still tell me, ‘Go for it!’ For the simple reason that you don’t get chances like this very often. I’ve never had one before, and I’m sure I’ll never have another one. Comparing this to gambling might not be the best way to look at it, but we’ve got all the right cards and a mountain of chips. The conditions are perfect. If we let a chance like this slip away, we’ll regret it for the rest of our lives.”

Tengo stared in silence at Komatsu ‘s utterly sinister smile.

Komatsu continued: “And the most important thing is that we are remaking Air Chrysalis into a much better work. It’s a story that should have been much better written. There’s something important in it, something that needs someone to bring it out. I’m sure you think so too, Tengo. Am I wrong? We each contribute our own special talents to the project: we pool our resources for one thing only, and that is to bring out that important something in the work. Our motives are pure: we can present them anywhere without shame.”

“Well, you can try to rationalise it all you want, you can invent all kinds of noble- sounding pretexts, but in the end, a scam is a scam.”

“Look, Tengo, you’re losing sight of one crucial fact,” Komatsu said, his mouth opening in a big, wide grin the likes of which Tengo had never seen. “Or should I say you are deliberately choosing not to look at it? And that’s the simple fact that you want to do this. You already feel that way – ‘risk’ and ‘morality’ be damned. I can see it. You’re itching to rewrite Air Chrysalis with your own hands. You want to be the one, not Fuka-Eri, who brings out that special something in the work. I want you to go home now and figure out what you really think. Stand in front of a mirror and give yourself a long, hard look. It’s written all over your face.”

Despite his unassuming life, Tengo has a past that haunts him. He spent a friendless childhood raised by an uncompromising single father. He has an obscure early memory of his mother that provokes a strong physical reaction in him whenever it enters his mind unprovoked. And he feels a strange kinship with a girl he once knew at school whom he feels certain was in a similar situation with her mother. The talent Tengo was able to display at school saved him and gave him an early independence from his father who now lives in a home for the elderly suffering from dementia.

Though still noncommittal to Komatsu’s proposed fraud, Tengo admits he is tempted to do the rewrite. Air Chrysalis is an amazing surreal tale containing fantastical creatures, an empathetic character, set in a sort of parallel world with two moons in the night sky but coupled with elements that could be interpreted as speaking to real world concerns. He is at least willing to meet the seventeen-year-old Fuka-Eri and her guardian. It is a somewhat unsettling meeting. Fuka-Eri seems a strikingly unusual girl and her guardian fills Tengo in on her unusual past including an escape from an apparent religious cult. Fuka-Eri’s guardian has his own motives for wanting to see the novel published and noticed.

Meanwhile, Aomame is unsettled herself. Ever since she took the stairs off the expressway, she’s been noticing little things that she never appreciated before. She seems sure she would have noticed a change in police uniforms and the fact that they now carry guns but apparently that alteration occurred two years ago. On the news she hears of a new agreement between the USA and the Soviet Union to cooperate on a space project. Aomame is not usually one to forget or not notice such developments.

Maybe I can look at it this way – the problem is not with me but with the world around me. It’s not that my consciousness or mind has given rise to some abnormality, but rather that some kind of incomprehensible power has caused the world around me to change.

The more she thought about it, the more natural her second hypothesis began to feel to her be cause, no matter how much she searched for it, she could not find in herself a gap or distortion in her mind.

And so she carried this hypothesis forward:

It’s not me but the world that’s deranged.

Yes, that settles it.

At some point in time, the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place. Like the switching of a track. In other words, my mind, here and now, belongs to the world that was, but the world itself has already changed into something else.

Soon the dowager contacts Aomame about a new case. The victim is a ten-year-old girl. The suffering she has endured is horrific. The dowager believes the man responsible is the head of an organisation best described as a religious cult, the same that Fuka-Eri escaped from. A man who is rarely seen in public and is always under tight security. Extracting justice will be Aomame’s most difficult job.

It is around this time that, looking at the night sky one evening, Aomame notices it contains two moons.

Aomame leaned her head back and looked up at the sky for a time. Even as her eyes took in the sky, her mind wandered through distant memories. […] Soon, she began to sense that the night sky she saw above her was somehow different from the sky she was used to seeing. The strangeness of it was subtle but undeniable.

Some time had to pass before she was able to grasp what the difference was. And even after she had grasped it she had to work hard to accept it. What her vision had seized upon, her mind could not easily confirm.

There were two moons in the sky – a small moon and a large one. They were floating there side by side. The large one was the usual moon that she had always seen. It was nearly full, and yellow. But there was another moon right next to it. It had an unfamiliar shape. It was somewhat lopsided, and greenish, as though thinly covered with Moss. This was what her vision had seized upon.

1Q84 is the third novel I have read by Haruki Murakami – not counting his surreal short book The Strange Library. I think it is fair to say this was my first true dive into the ‘real’ Murakami. I have previously read Norwegian Wood and South of the Border, West of the Sun and, while they do contain some Murakami tropes such as the loner male protagonist obsessing about a girl from his past, which is also true of 1Q84, they do not contain much of the surreal or magical that people associate with Murakami.

1Q84 is a very easy to read book. Do not be intimidated by its size at all. I am a slow reader and yet I breezed through its 1,318 pages at a much faster rate than I usually read. I put this down to the skill of the writing, which takes a story that could be considered complex, and is certainly long, and yet has made it a burdenless read. Unlike other long novels, where the pace and the reader’s interest can ebb and flow, in 1Q84 I felt engaged and accompanied all the way through with little sign of the usual tricks done to intrigue the reader.

1Q84 is usually described as a trilogy. I read a single-volume version but it was first published in Japan in three separate volumes. Recently, I wrote a post on book series. In it, to use an overused metaphor, I put book series on a spectrum from those that are really one long novel to those that are episodic with little overarching story. 1Q84 I believe lies at the former end. That is, like The Lord of the Rings, I believe 1Q84 is more a single long novel than a series.

Murakami is sometimes described as a ‘globalist writer’. His affection for Western literature and his work as a translator is well known and is assumed to be the basis of his ability to appeal across cultural and language barriers. Despite his novels being set in Japan with Japanese characters, cultural differences, singularities do not feature strongly. To a large extent his stories could take place in almost any modern city.

That being said, where the Japanese context does feature in 1Q84, the reader is understandably drawn into questioning what it means. Tengo’s father has lived a difficult life, first as a young man in Japanese-controlled Manchuria and then struggling to start over in post-war Japan. Another character was given away as a baby, his parents caught between Korea, Japan and Russia in the collapse of Japan’s empire at the end of the Second World War and facing impossible choices.

“I was born on Sakhalin Island the year before the war ended. The south end of Sakhalin was a Japanese territory called Karafuto, but the Soviets occupied it, and my parents were taken prisoner. My father apparently had some kind of job with the harbour facilities. Most of the Japanese civilian prisoners were returned to Japan soon enough, but my parents couldn’t go to Japan because they were Koreans who had been sent to Sakhalin as labourers. The Japanese government refused to take them. Once Japan lost the war, Koreans were no longer subjects of the Empire of Japan. It was terrible. The government didn’t have a shred of sympathy for them. They could have gone to North Korea if they wanted to, but not to the South, because the Soviet Union at the time didn’t recognise the existence of South Korea. My parents came from a fishing village near Pusan and had no desire to go to the North. They had no relatives or friends up there. I was still a baby. They put me in the hands of a couple being repatriated to Japan, and those people took me across the straits to Hokkaido. The food situation in Sakhalin at the time was horrendous, and the Soviet army’s treatment of their prisoners was terrible. My parents had other small children and must have figured it would be hard to bring me up there. They probably figured they would send me over to Hokkaido first and join me later. Or maybe it was just an excuse to get rid of me. I don’t know the details. In any case, we were never reunited.”

Newly invented religious organisations and alternative societies are a large feature of the setting of 1Q84, a phenomenon not unique to Japan but nevertheless leads to questions about what is perceived as lacking from culture and society to prompt their emergence, where their appeal lies, how do they become perverted regardless of their well-intentioned origins and what dangers do they present. And, given the parallel world aspect of 1Q84, written in retrospect, is a statement being made of a country at a crossroads and the consequences of the path taken?

“Correct: two moons. That is the sign that the track has been switched. That is how you can tell the two worlds apart. Not that all of the people here can see two moons. In fact, most people are not aware of it. In other words, the number of people who know that this is 1Q84 is quite limited.”

One aspect of 1Q84 that I avoided interpreting further is the matter of sexual abuse, particularly of children, within religious organisations and alternative societies. This, of course, is not unique to Japan either. However, in the fictional example in 1Q84, an explanation of sorts – a supernatural one – is made for it. As I said, I did not want to read anything into it. I feel fairly confident that the reason for this is driven by considerations of the plot and possibly the themes and that it was not to suggest there may be some rationalisation for sexual abuse. Yet, I admit it was one aspect of this novel that did not sit well with me.

1Q84 will appeal to lovers of literature. It is full of references to other works both well-known and obscure. The list is a long one and includes Fraser, Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare’s MacBeth. Many, no doubt, were above my comprehension. Chekov, for example, is perhaps the most referenced but I am not familiar enough with his work to explore the relevance.

For some, the connection is clear. The surreal, insectile nature of Air Chrysalis with Kafka’s Metamorphosis for example. Or the anxiety of being constantly under surveillance being reminiscent of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – a connection that surely cannot be missed. What I was most reminded of in 1Q84 were stories of travels to other worlds which often also involve female characters taking the leap – Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials. Especially His Dark Materials because Air Chrysalis also contains the aspect of separate yet inseparable parts to the self which reminded me of the person-and-daemon of His Dark Materials.

Murakami certainly has his tropes. So much so the New York Times created Murakami Bingo as a ‘companion game’ to play alongside reading Murakami. Scoring 1Q84 on the 5×5 bingo card, I was surprised to only give it a 13 out of 25. I had thought by the end I would have covered all the squares. Murakami has a reputation for difficulty with writing female characters and sex scenes. I think parts of 1Q84 validate that reputation. Some female characters, when the reader first meets them, are described very physically, almost sexually. And the sex scenes read more like a male fantasy than something that might have happened.

Despite Murakami’s reputation for quirkiness and as a surrealist, I don’t think things get out of hand in 1Q84. The story has its weird aspects yet feels very grounded. For the most part at least. Early in Book 2 I was beginning to wonder. Worlds were beginning to collide, connections were being made. As things threatened to turn meta, I began to wonder if what I was reading was really a novel written by an older Tengo, taking inspiration from Air Chrysalis, his own past and imagining events turning towards his own satisfaction.

“According to Chekhov,” Tamaru said, rising from his chair, “once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.”

“Meaning what?”

Tamaru stood facing Aomame directly. He was only an inch or two taller than she was. “Meaning, don’t bring unnecessary props into a story. If a pistol appears, it has to be fired at some point. Chekhov liked to write stories that did away with all useless ornamentation.”

Aomame straightened the sleeves of her dress and slung her bag over her shoulder. “And that worries you – if a pistol comes on the scene, it’s sure to be fired at some point.”

“In Chekhov’s view, yes.”

“So you’re thinking you’d rather not hand me a pistol.”

“They’re dangerous. And Illegal. And Chekhov is a writer you can trust.”

“But this is not a story. We’re talking about the real world.”

Tamaru narrowed his eyes and looked hard at Aomame. Then, slowly opening his mouth, he said, “Who knows?”

If anything, these moments of uncertainty added to the intrigue of 1Q84. If you like surrealism, there is plenty to ponder in 1Q84. If you think surrealism is not for you, it is given a relatively light touch and should not put you off this novel.

As I reached near page 1,300 I began to wonder how on earth will this story wrap up with less than twenty pages to go. And in some respects, it does not entirely. There are some parts of the plot that are not completely resolved and several things that are not explained. I was surprised by how ok I was with this even after 1,300 pages. I did not feel at all unfulfilled. It is a tribute to the skill of the writing to keep the reader engaged for such a long novel, to give a sense of satisfaction and closure, without answering every question they might have.

Haruki Murakami is unquestionably one of the giants of world literature today. The release of a new novel by him is an almost guaranteed bestseller and he has built a legion of devoted fans by appealing across generations and cultures. 1Q84 might not count as one of his most popular novels with fans and critics but it is unmistakable in its Murakami-ness. It is not only necessary reading for any true enthusiast but the skill and quirkiness on display means it can be enjoyed by newcomers to his work and its immense size need not be a reason to start elsewhere.