Before 1Q84, Haruki Murakami was a famous novelist. After 1Q84, he was something else — a publishing phenomenon whose new books arrived at midnight release parties in Tokyo bookstores the way Harry Potter books had arrived in Britain a decade earlier. The book is three volumes. It runs to nine hundred and twenty-five pages in the English hardcover. It sold a million copies in Japan in its first month. The book is unusual. The response to the book is the thing I want to explain.
Murakami was sixty when 1Q84 came out in Japan in 2009. He had been publishing for thirty years. He had survived the long apprentice period of writing short, pared-down novels about lonely men listening to jazz records — Norwegian Wood, South of the Border, West of the Sun, Sputnik Sweetheart — and the long middle period of writing longer, stranger novels about lonely men discovering wells into unconscious worlds — The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore. 1Q84 is the book where he stopped writing the novel inside the novel and wrote the world around both.
The setup is this. It is 1984 in Tokyo. A woman named Aomame, a fitness instructor and occasional assassin who kills abusive men for a wealthy dowager, climbs down an emergency staircase off a Metropolitan Expressway and enters a version of 1984 that has two moons in the sky. She calls this version 1Q84 — Q for question mark. In the same Tokyo, a writer named Tengo is hired to ghost-rewrite a strange manuscript by a seventeen-year-old girl named Fuka-Eri, a manuscript about a cult in the mountains and entities called the Little People who emerge from the mouth of a dead goat. Tengo and Aomame knew each other when they were ten years old. They have not seen each other since. The book is about them finding their way back.
I am not going to summarize more than that. You should not go in with a summary. What I want to explain is why this book, specifically, turned Murakami into the publishing event he became.
Before 1Q84, Murakami’s novels asked the reader to enter a dream. The reader entered willingly. The dream was small-scale, individual, private. A well in a garden. A cat that leaves. A jazz record played in an empty apartment. The reader’s loneliness met the book’s loneliness and both were comforted.
1Q84 does the reverse. It does not invite the reader into a dream. It argues that the reader is already in one, and has been all along, and that the task of the novel is to show the reader the two moons that are already in the sky. The dream-logic of the book is not a retreat from the 1984 Tokyo that surrounds the characters. It is an accurate description of the 1984 Tokyo that surrounds the characters, seen clearly for the first time. Murakami had been rehearsing this idea since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but in 1Q84 he committed to it completely. The fantastic elements are not escape. They are recognition.
This is why the book hit so hard in Japan. Japan in 2009 was eight years past the Aum Shinrikyo subway attacks. It was fourteen years past the Kobe earthquake. It was two years from the Fukushima catastrophe. The national mood had turned toward a question Murakami had been asking for twenty years and that nobody else had answered as well — how many of the structures we are living inside are real, and how many are cults we have not yet recognized as cults. 1Q84‘s Little People, its Sakigake cult, its assassinations of patriarchs, its two moons — all of this is a parable for the second Japan that Japanese readers had been living in for a decade and had not been given the fictional vocabulary to name. Murakami gave it to them. That is what the midnight lines in the bookstores were for.
For the English-language reader, 1Q84 works at a slight remove. You will not feel the specific national relief that Japanese readers felt. You will feel something else — a kind of patient, exhausted, curious alignment with two adult strangers finding each other in a world that has gently stopped making sense. The ending is quiet. It is also one of the most hopeful endings Murakami has ever written, which is saying something, because most of his endings hedge.
A note for first-time Murakami readers: do not start here. Start with Norwegian Wood, which is short, or Kafka on the Shore, which is the trial run for this book. 1Q84 is for people who already know they like being in Murakami’s head. If you do not yet know, the shorter books will tell you faster and cheaper. If you already know, 1Q84 is the long visit you came for.
A related vagobond.com piece: On Translation and Survival.
Readers and fans of 1Q84 will really enjoy Future World 2323 — my novel set three hundred years from now, in a world where the two moons of our present have become seven, and where the strangers are still finding each other. Different century. Same problem. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
