Murakami - 1Q84

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (Harvill Secker)

I don't think even the Greeks had a word for this. Among the Oedipus and Elektra stories, they didn't find the need for one where a girl kills the father of the one-off lover of her childhood sweetheart, the father being leader of a religious cult while the girl is immaculately impregnated by the cult to provide a new leader. Or something like that.

Murakami's almost 1000 pages are well-organized enough and the story given a gradual enough pace for the complexities to assimilate rather more easily than one sentence can summarize. It is the long distance separation and love story of Aomame, a clandestine hired hit lady revenging sex abuse cases, and Tengo, who rewrites a sensational best-seller in a publicity coup. The religious cult and those uncovering its abuses are stalking each other throughout. It's a thriller and succeeds in that project, much more so than Steig Larrson did for me. Murakami's method is at its most lucid in his Chandleresque and Raymond Carver-like economy of prose style but also in his trademark use of parallel worlds and unexplainable phenomena. It's surprising how far one can suspend disbelief and allow Murakami's description of everyday detail and characters isolated in the mass culture of modern Japan but the synopsis of the novel Tengo rewrites for the teenage Fuka-Eri can't disguise what a lot of hokum it really is.

One has to forgive Murakami's obsession with expressionless, poised young women and, usually, their breasts. There is a building of leitmotifs in creating character and themes and it almost seems as if whole paragraphs recur, but I'm sure they don't. What Murakami does, or his translator for him, is achieve moments of radiant beauty, like on the occasion when Aomame visits her employer, the dowager,

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end. Whenever she came in here, Aomame felt as if she had lost all sense of time.

Or, in the final pages when Aomame and Tengo are reunited for the first time since childhood,

Inside him, twenty years dissolved and mixed into one complex, swirling whole. / Wordlessly, Tengo observed the scene, as if watching the destruction and re-birth of a planet.

The overlapping worlds of 1984 and 1Q84, of fiction and fiction within fiction, of the worlds of the characters, is dizzying but brilliantly conceived. If the Air Chrysalis and Little People themes are not entirely convincing, the novel as a whole does throughout and this must be Murakami's finest work, ostensibly expanding the early novel, South of the Border, West of the Sun with all the layers of strangeness that his subsequent books developed. Thoroughly enjoyable and by no means as daunting as the weight of it might suggest. It never fails to maintain its impetus and a manageable amount of tension. Admirable work.