Murakami Review
Paul
Gabriel, a professor of modern Japanese literature and head of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona, was responsible for translating the third book of 1Q84. His interview with The Atlantic about the translation of the novel into English is available here.
Unbeknownst to Aomame, her decision to climb down the emergency stairwell has brought her into an alternate reality. She begins to notice inexplicable changes in the world around her, such as sudden alterations in the uniforms and standard-issue firearms of the police force. Another strange development is that the US and Soviet Union are cooperating on a project to construct a permanent observation post on the moon. Of even more concern to Aomame is that new historical events appear in the newspaper archives, including a shootout in 1981 between police and a radical group called Akebono.
As the parallel narratives draw closer together, it becomes apparent that Tengo and Aomame have become deeply entangled with a cult that is connected with much more dangerous and supernatural influences than both characters first expected.
Murakami uses the colour green as a recurring visual element throughout the novel, adding to the otherworldly feel of the narrative and perhaps suggesting that the green second moon of 1Q84 is casting its light far and wide throughout the alternate reality.
As I mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this review, some critics have accused Murakami of writing about sex very badly. For his efforts in 1Q84, he received a nomination for the 2011 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award, which David Guterson ultimately won with passages from his fifth novel, Ed King.
Murakami is not just an author but also a marathon runner and his experience in testing the limits of his physical endurance probably informed his approach to 1Q84, a three-year task that would test the limits of his literary abilities.
Murakami also grew up reading Western literature. In his early teens he preferred Stendhal, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky over the Japanese classics.[42] While at Kobe High, he began reading hard-boiled detective novelists like Raymond Chandler, then moved on to writers like Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kurt Vonnegut.[43]
Murakami has since been an important translator of English literature into Japanese. Among the writers whose work he has translated are Fitzgerald, Capote, John Irving and Paul Theroux.[44] Murakami has also translated into Japanese the complete works of Raymond Carver.[45]
What Murakami might have found particularly interesting about 1984 as a starting point is that, while the outlook for the future of the country at the time was extremely positive, it was also the year that Shoko Asahara founded the cult Aum Shinrikyō, which was responsible for the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attacks. Setting his novel in the near past (and employing a cult as a key antagonist) may therefore have allowed Murakami to explore a period of time where the disenchantment of a section of individuals with mainstream Japanese society began to express itself in the increasing prominence of cults in Japan and eventually in the radicalised Aum of the 1990s.
Murakami has also written two non-fiction books concerning the 1995 sarin gas attacks. The first of the two books, Underground, consists of interviews with gas attack survivors and relatives of those who were seriously injured or died in the attacks. The second, The Place That Was Promised: Underground 2, consists of interviews with members and former members of Aum. The books were published together in English in one volume, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.[62]
The attacks in question occurred on 20 March 1995. Aum cult members, under orders from Asahara, boarded carriages on five subway lines during the morning rush hour. They had wrapped plastic bags of liquid sarin in newspaper, which they dropped on the floor in their respective carriages. The perpetrators were carrying umbrellas with sharpened points, which they used to puncture the bags before leaving the train. According to Rubin, around 5,000 people inhaled the gas: eleven died and many others were severely injured.[63]
This idea of the attacks as a mirror image of Japanese society may have inspired the world of 1Q84, which can be interpreted as a distorted, darker mirror of the year 1984.[72] As Leader says to Aomame:
The idea of 1Q84 as a distorted mirror of 1984 might have informed the design of the English language edition, where alternate page numbers are printed as they would look in the reflection of a mirror.[74]
Tengo has some similarities to Akio Namimura, a former Aum member. Like Namimura, Tengo is a loner, has a difficult relationship with his father[87] and works at a cram school while thinking of becoming a novelist.[88]
At the conclusion of 1Q84, Murakami leaves the fate of his antagonists hanging. This is probably because, unexpectedly for most of us (although the opening quote should have made it clear), 1Q84 is, at heart, an epic love story and, if there is an additional remotely political meaning in the novel, it is that true love will overcome any Barnum and Bailey world (even malevolent cults and inexplicably tiny, chrysalis-obsessed people, whose distorted reality falls away in the face of that love).
Wow, well this certainly sounds like a complex read. I like how you say that you still loved it even if it was kinda weird. Yet to read anything by this author but I am certainly intrigued now. Great review!
And Murakami takes the strange step of including a lengthy quote from Samuel Willenberg, survivor of the Treblinka extermination camp, as the entirety of Chapter 32, the final chapter in Book 1. (Which I guess suggests that the narrator chose the quote and decided to include it in his telling of the story?)
In my writing workshops, one workshop leader always had participants imagine the work under consideration in its best form at the end of the workshop. I think Killing Commendatore in its best form is a book that makes some kind of statement about art, what it does to viewers, how one makes it, why one makes it, what it means to devote your life to art, and how that can affect artists.
If only that had anything to do with the rest of the book! There are bits and pieces here and there that readers might be able to use to come to some sort of conclusion along those lines, but Murakami is asking readers to do a lot of the work for him.
>>>It feels like this is a good metaphor for a tortured artist trying forever and ever to >>>achieve some intangible, unobtainable goal with their art.
>>>If only that had anything to do with the rest of the book!
Your review is so lousy that I am really excited to read the book. I am from Denmark and the book will be published in Danish in November this year. I wonder why you review his books when you dislike him so much?
Hez: I probably used to be a cultist, but getting older and going to grad school for creative writing cured me of that crap. I need to read Wind-up Bird in Japanese at some point. For a while I thought that 1Q84 had ruined it for me, but I perused it briefly recently and was pretty impressed with the first chapter. Norwegian Wood is still pretty great.
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