Good, but not great

Haruki Murakami is one of the superstars of the literary firmament, a Japanese phenomenon of rarefied visions whose work has caught the public imagination at an international level. His latest novel, the gargantuan three-volume 1Q84 — finally available in a single hefty but neat paperback format — seems, on its surface, to fulfil every claim as to this revered author’s greatness.

The distinguishing marks are all present and accounted for: fleshing out the usual and inevitable boy-meets-girl type love story are the jazz and pop culture references, the Chandler-esque mystery element, the disaffected casual sex collisions of an empty generation, the spectacular magic realism leaps that attempt to make sense of a society that has either lost its soul or has spun beyond the reach of logical understanding.

The novel’s first two parts advance in alternating chapters, covering several months during 1984. The first story thread follows Aomame, a beautiful, promiscuous fitness instructor/assassin who feels that she has slipped into an alternate reality, a kind of 1Q84 (with the ‘Q’ standing for ‘question mark’) that boasts two moons in its sky. “Please remember,” a taxi driver tells her, very early on, “things are not what they seem.”

For Aomame, life has known only one brief shining moment. A bullied child, she once held the hand of a boy that she has not seen in 20 years.

That boy, Tengo, is the focus of the book’s second thread. Now a maths teacher and still-unpublished writer, he is given the task of reworking a story that an editor friend has plucked from the contest’s slush pile. The story, called ‘Air Chrysalis’, is a poorly crafted but utterly haunting tale penned by an extremely strange 17-year-old girl, Fuka-Eri. But what seems allegorical is actually based on fact. From here, we learn that Fuka-Eri is visited by four-inch high creatures that she has come to know as ‘the Little People’ and that she had been involved from childhood with a sinister Orwellian mind-control cult run by a depraved child molestor known as ‘the Leader’. And it is the cult that ultimately merges the story-lines and brings Aomame and Tengo together again.

Novels as universally hyped as 1Q84 tend, invariably, to disappoint. There is a great deal to like here, not least the sheer scope of Murakami’s narrative and surrealistic ambition, but the author’s trademark quirks, stretched over 1,300 pages, seem to have lost some of the wonder that had made his most notable work, novels like Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, such triumphs. In the final analysis, 1Q84 is a good read, but not a great one.