“But don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”
“Even cats and dogs need names. A newly changed world must need one, too.
“1Q84–that’s what I’ll call this new world, Aomame decided.”
This novel is certainly ambitious, meticulously constructed, and vividly realized. However, its sheer weight (1,200 pages!), volume of plotlines, and tortured sexuality ultimately feel like too much for Haruki Murakami to balance.
"1Q84" is compelling, dealing with religious cults, portals between worlds, mortality, supernatural leprachauns, and the pursuit of love. Some sneaky humor appears, and a challenging scene of a long-set-up reunion is rendered in a pretty way.
“Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”
However, the author's focus on breasts and underage girls becomes overwhelming, making the effort to track and organize competing narratives extremely difficult. Every character has a borderline disturbing relationship with sex, and that extends to Murakami, leading to eight references to ejaculate, 16 to semen, and 71 to breasts.
“Now he realized that he was inside Fuka-Eri, ejaculating toward her uterus. This was not something that he wanted to be doing.”
“Still, her lower body retained a trace of that special feeling that was always there the morning after an intense night of sex – the sweet lassitude that comes from having your insides powerfully churned. She seemed to notice, too, an unfamiliar sensation between her buttocks.”
Too often, the book felt like a middle-aged Asian man’s fever dream of nubile young Asian women having sex together and with others.
“Lopsided breasts, pubic hair like a poorly tended soccer field.”
“Tengo had to caution himself not to look down there, but he couldn’t help it. His eyes moved to her chest as if toward the center of a great whirlpool.”
To be fair, I also struggled mightily with Murakami's "Novelist as a Vocation" for different reasons.
"1Q84" relies heavily on coincidences and cognitive leaps, and the English translation leads to some shaky transitions and bizarre similes and metaphors.
“Charles looked less like a prince than a high school physics teacher with stomach trouble.”
“ … His voice as hard and cold as a metal ruler left for a long time in a fridge.”
“It was not just that he had terrible style: he also gave the impression that he was deliberately desecrating the very idea of wearing clothes.”
The overall impression is of a meticulously arranged work that loses some of its vitality through repetition and length, leading one to speculate whether Murakami would have done well to pare "1Q84" down severely -- and to tone down the off-putting sexual obsessions.
“Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.”
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