Slowly, unknowingly, Aomame and Tengo work their way toward each other, even as contending forces try to prevent or promote their meeting. Along the way, each interacts with a series of striking characters. There’s an immensely wealthy dowager who has founded an organization to help battered wives and (secretly) punish abusive husbands; a gay bodyguard of the utmost efficiency with a taste for philosophical speculation; 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, a man who rapes — or perhaps is raped by — pre-pubescent girls.
Murakami’s novels have been translated into a score of languages, but it would be hard to imagine that any of them could be better than the English versions by Jay Rubin, partnered here with Philip Gabriel. Fuka-Eri peers into Tengo’s eyes “as if she were looking into an empty house with her face pressed up against the glass.” In a photograph, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone resemble “a couple of men in the construction industry discussing how they were going to switch to cheap, shoddy building material.” Tengo’s editor, Komatsu, “was tall and gangly, with an oversized mouth and an undersized nose. He had long limbs and nicotine-stained fingers, reminiscent of those failed revolutionary intellectuals in nineteenth-century Russian novels.”
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
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(Knopf) - "1Q84: A Novel" by Haruki Murakami
While “1Q84” is distinctly Murakamian, some of its elements do pay homage to other masterpieces. For instance, when Aomame is led into a darkened room to meet the Leader, the scene calls to mind a very similar one in G.K. Chesterton’s nightmarish “The Man Who Was Thursday.” An air chrysalis bears more than a little resemblance to the cocoons containing replicants in the film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The strange story of the “town of cats” obviously derives from Algernon Blackwood’s horror classic “Ancient Sorceries.” Throughout, too, Murakami fosters an ever-intensifying aura of the uncanny by repeated references to Janacek’s “Sinfonietta,” by allusions to the bizarre rituals surrounding the Leader and his shrine maidens, by the haunting phrase “irretrievably lost” and, most ominously, by the sudden presence in the sky of two moons, the one we know and the other small and greenish “as though thinly covered with moss.” It’s not a good sign when a certain character notices that his tongue has become coated with what looks like greenish moss.
Despite its great length, Murakami’s novel is tightly plotted, without fat, and he knows how to make dialogue, even philosophical dialogue, exciting. In the very middle of the book, Aomame’s long discussion with the Leader about the nature of good and evil recalls Ivan’s conversation with the Devil in “The Brothers Karamazov.” Still, Murakami can then turn around and describe hotel pickups and “all-night sex feasts” or imagine a sinister equivalent to the MacArthur Foundation. He creates mysteries about Tengo’s parentage, suggests that one character has been reincarnated with memories of her previous life, and hints that the Little People may be intent on undermining humanity but to do so require the services of a Perceiver and a Receiver, who must, in some way, be united as one. It is even intimated that Tengo’s storytelling may have been the engine that transported Aomame into the world of 1Q84.
There’s no question about the sheer enjoyability of this gigantic novel, both as an eerie thriller and as a moving love story. Nonetheless, Murakami doesn’t neatly solve all its mysteries or tie up all his threads. “1Q84” also treads close to being a grandly conceived yet still slightly pulpy melodrama, something like a more fantastical “Atlas Shrugged.” There’s even a cliffhanger at the end of nearly every chapter. For me, though, there’s just no getting round two crucial facts: I read the book in three days and have been thinking about it ever since.
Dirda reviews books for The Post every Thursday. Join his discussion at wapo.st/reading-room.
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