Goodnight, moon

1Q84

By Haruki Murakami

924 pages

Available at National Book Store

One of my favorite bedtime books to read to my daughter was Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown’s mysterious and disquieting little tale of a mother rabbit putting her baby to sleep. The kid says “Good night” to everything in the room — clocks, windows, toys, a mouse, the moon outside — until the story is stripped down to a barely-audible hush. It’s perfect for bedtime, but kind of eerie, in its own way.

Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, 1Q84, affects you in a similar way: it feels like an adult telling you a completely fantastic, unbelievable tale, yet it’s full of details that conjure up the real world. Murakami’s book was published in Japan in three parts — now all bound together as a single doorstop tome for the English edition. Yet you get the sense Murakami could have kept right on going with the imaginary world he’s created in 1Q84.

A lot has changed for Murakami since Norwegian Wood, his early and popular 1987 novel (recently filmed by Tran Anh Hung): worldwide success, plus a kind of rarefied position as a guru of modern Japanese culture. And his novels have grown weirder and weirder. While Norwegian Wood was a straightforward love story with elements of (literary) ghosts haunting the characters’ memories, later works such as Kafka by the Shore were apt to feature an evil Johnnie Walker icon come to life, or people who reduce themselves down to one-inch size (as in 1Q84). He’s broadened his imagination to the supernatural, in other words. But it still reads like Murakami.

Not everyone loves his style (rendered in English, incidentally, by longtime translator Jay Rubin). The UK Guardian bestowed its “Bad Sex Writing Award” on Murakami recently (among other contenders) for passages such as this: “A freshly made ear and a freshly made vagina look very much alike, Tengo thought. Both appeared to be turned outward, trying to listen closely to something — something like a distant bell.”

Of course, Murakami is beyond caring what critics think of his, let’s say, “unconventional” sex descriptions. He’s a cultural barometer, of sorts, whether writing fiction, or about Japanese earthquakes, or the sirin-gas attacks, or running as an adjunct to writing. A few years back, he wrote an essay for the New York Times that asked us to imagine two worlds existing: one in which the events of 9/11 never occurred (this was the world of Not Chaos, he wrote), and the other world being the one that actually resulted after 9/11: a world plunged into chaos. He argued in his essay that both worlds actually exist, and it’s a question of how we live in each one that matters. Of course, one could rightly point out that the world has always had one foot planted firmly in chaos, way before 9/11. But as a literary metaphor, the “two worlds” scenario indicated where Murakami’s fiction was heading.

1Q84 lays out chapters alternating between two main characters — Tengo, a math tutor and unpublished novelist, and Aomame, a physical therapist who moonlights as an assassin. The story takes place in the year 1984, and the title refers to strange events — an unknown quantity in the lives of these two people that makes them question what world they’re living in. (For instance, the sudden existence of two moons in the sky.)

Tengo is recruited by an editor friend to help rewrite a fictional manuscript submitted by a strangely beautiful 17-year-old girl named Fuka-Eri and to pass it off as her work for a literary contest. He reluctantly does, and the success of the published story, Air Chrysalis, pushes the novel — and the novel’s reality — into strange, otherworldly directions.

Meanwhile, Aomame is employed by an aged and well-off widow who runs a safe house for abused women and who occasionally metes out punishment to men who hurt women.

Both Tengo and Aomame somehow become the target of a cult-like religion called Sakigake, and as their stories slowly intertwine, the novel explores themes of memory, destiny, good and evil, cats and lesbians — the usual soil of Murakami’s fiction, in other words.

There’s also an apocalyptic strain, which is very “in” these days, as when Aomame and Ayumi discuss men, and the end of the world (not in that order):

“It’s the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we’re choosing things for ourselves but in fact we’re not choosing anything. It could be that everything’s decided in advance and we pretend we’re making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.”

“If that’s true, life is pretty dark.”

“Maybe so.”

“But if you can love somebody with your whole heart — even if he’s a terrible person and even if he doesn’t love you back — life is not a hell, at least, though it might be kind of dark. Is that what you’re saying?” Ayumi asked.

“Exactly.”

“But still,” Ayumi said, “it seems to me this world has a terrible shortage of logic and kindness.”

“You may be right,” Ayumi said. “But it’s too late to trade it in for another one.”

“The exchange window expired a long time ago,” Ayumi said. “And the receipt’s been thrown away.”

“You said it.”

“Oh, well, no problem,” Ayumi said.

“The world’s going to end before we know it.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“And the kingdom’s going to come.”

“I can hardly wait.”

 I enjoyed 1Q84 more than Murakami’s previous large work, Kafka on the Shore, and about as much as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, which similarly slipped down into the crevice between two worlds. In this tendency, Murakami has long been compared to David Lynch, but it might be just as fair to say that Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire were influenced by Murakami’s surreal gaze.

One gambit that pays off in 1Q84: since the novel is set in what Murakami describes as a “near-past world” (whereas Orwell’s novel was set in a “near-future world”), he places the reader in a time before all the technology we’ve come to take for granted existed: television was simpler back in 1984, with the Japanese media company NHK collecting monthly cable TV subscriptions; there are no cell phones, of course, so communication between characters is necessarily limited; no Internet, so research is done on old library microfiche readers. In a way, it’s refreshing to read about a world that’s almost trapped in the amber of a recent past. This adds to Murakami’s effect of time being halted, or examined from a different, curious angle. Like the details of Goodnight Moon, everything seems brighter, stranger, under this new light.

Other enjoyments: the casual descriptions of Japanese meal preparation that dot Murakami’s writing. Known for his love of mundane tasks (such as ironing), I find his food and cooking descriptions vivid and appetizing. Plus there are the usual pop culture references — everything from Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crowne Affair or On the Beach with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner to Janacek’s Sinfonietta or It’s Only a Paper Moon.

Though it flags a bit in the final leg of its marathon, 1Q84 never relents in its grasp of a strange, hypnotic, almost hyper-real reality. Some have noted that Murakami’s Japan bears little resemblance to the “real Japan” out there. But then, how could it, when it’s populated by little people who climb out of the mouths of dead goats, or night skies lit up by two moons?