Two weeks ago, Haruki Murakami was widely rumored to be among the front-runners for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He didn’t win — this year. But Murakami is clearly one of the most popular and admired novelists in the world today, a brilliant practitioner of serious, yet irresistibly engaging, literary fantasy. He has already been honored with the Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the World Fantasy Award. His best-known novels — “A Wild Sheep Chase,” “Kafka on the Shore” and “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” — have even established Murakami as something of a cult author among college-age readers. Perhaps the American writer he most resembles, in multiple ways, is Michael Chabon.
Murakami’s latest novel, “1Q84,” is an immensely long book, originally published in three volumes in Japan (the first two parts in 2009, the third last year). Still, you’ll be glad that Knopf decided to bring out the English version as a single massive hardcover: Once you start reading “1Q84,” you won’t want to do much else until you’ve finished it.
More from Michael Dirda
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.”
Murakami possesses many gifts, but chief among them is an almost preternatural gift for suspenseful storytelling. Here he once again explores his favorite theme, succinctly stated by a character in his previous novel, “After Dark”: “The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you’ve had it: things’ll never be the same.”
When “1Q84” opens, a young woman named Aomame finds herself stuck in gridlock on Tokyo’s elevated Metropolitan Expressway. Carrying a “sharp object in the bottom of her shoulder bag” and dressed to the nines, Aomame is worried about being late for a critical appointment. As if reading her mind, the taxi driver suddenly mentions that there’s an emergency service stairway nearby, and that it leads down to a street close to a subway stop. He doesn’t recommend that she climb down these rusty stairs, especially in a miniskirt and heels, but the subway offers her only chance to avoid being late. As Aomame opens the door of the cab, the driver mysteriously says: “Don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”
Yes and no. By the time Aomame reaches a deluxe hotel for her appointment — hers, by the way, is “a profession requiring specialized techniques and training” — she is no longer in 1984. The world has “switched tracks,” and she has entered a kind of parallel reality, which she eventually dubs 1Q84. Not much seems terribly different at first, but gradually she learns that certain aspects of history (and cosmology) have changed, and that nearly all these changes are linked to a mysterious commune called Sakigake. At its inception, Sakigake resembled any other organic cooperative run by ’60s dropouts and onetime college radicals. But it has recently filed with the government as a religious institution and grown increasingly secretive and wealthy. There is talk of a mysterious but never seen Leader.
Meanwhile, Murakami establishes a second story line, alternating Aomame’s increasingly dangerous adventures with those of a lonely would-be novelist named Tengo. Against his better judgment, Tengo has been talked into secretly revising a short novel called “Air Chrysalis” so it can win a major prize. The plot is fantastic — involving Little People who emerge from the mouth of a dead goat — but its 17-year-old author is even stranger. Beautiful but unnervingly expressionless, Fuka-Eri can scarcely read or write, and her speech is unnaturally clipped and laconic. She insists that the details of her novel are absolutely true and that you can even see the Little People “if you try.” Until she ran away at the age of 10, Fuka-Eri lived at Sakigake.
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