1Q84: Too Much, Not Enough, or Just Nice?

I know it’s a bit late, to be writing a review of sorts 10 years after the fact, but 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami was a great book that I really enjoyed, and a journey to boot. Not to mention that there’s quite a lot to unpack here, sans erotica.

When I finished the 925-page-marathon of a book that 1Q84 is, I immediately had many questions — Who were the ‘Little People’? How did they pull fibres out of the air to form their Air Chrysalis? What voice were the followers of Sakigake listening to? Why did Murakami make me read a passage with a sex scene involving a minor?

However, when I decided to zoom out from the details and look at the novel as a whole, I realized that these seemingly pertinent details become lost in the background.

In the entirety of the year 1984, our two protagonists — Aomame the personal-trainer-turned-assassin and Tengo the ghostwriter-turned-prophet — give us a glimpse into two ordinary lives gone loopy due to unforeseen circumstances.

Aomame, through her own shared anger against misogyny with a wealthy dowager, begins to discreetly murder men who thoroughly deserve their fate of ‘going to another world’. Tengo, a cram school teacher and amateur writer, ghostwrites and polishes a story called Air Chrysalis, which was begun by an eccentric teenage girl named Fuka-Eri.

Unbeknownst to the two main characters, due to their undertakings, they had been usurped upon a new world. Upon realization, Aomame calls it 1Q84 instead of 1984; the ‘Q’ stands for ‘Question mark’ due to her confusion. Tengo, similarly, calls it the ‘Cat Town’, aptly named after a strange limbo world he comes across in one of the books he is reading. As it turns out, the new world that they unknowingly entered, was somewhat dangerous.

The first, and most obvious idea in the novel, as splashed across the cover and spine, is the homage to George Orwell’s novel 1984. The highly guarded and isolated religious organization (Sakigake) seems to be the most direct allusion to the society portrayed by Orwell himself. It also follows, that the seemingly omniscient and omnipresent ‘little people’ channel a similar feeling to the concept of ‘Big Brother is always watching’.

There’s also the pseudo-anti-hero Ushikawa, who is hired by Sakigake to perform reconnaissance on the protagonists, and is ultimately offed by the dowager’s right hand man, due to a misstep of his own. Even Tengo’s father, the ever-diligent NHK Service fee collector, brings his own flavor of surveillance.

Later on in the novel, all 3 ‘main’ characters are visited by a relentless NHK service fee collector whose identity remains unknown, while Tengo’s father is in a coma. The only plausible explanation I can muster for this is that the unnamed fee collector is a manifestation of Tengo’s father (since there’s already a whole bunch of supernatural stuff going on, might as well, right?).

Despite the fact that this parallel to the literary classic is basically flying off the pages into the readers’ eyes, it doesn’t seem to be a very important anchor for the plot:

The main idea of 1Q84 (to me) is the contrast between the mundane and the extraordinary.

What does that mean? Specifically in a book where one can get ‘irretrievably lost’ in the undercurrent, or ‘down into the ocean’?

It becomes quite easy to infer in this book that there seems to be some cognizance on Murakami’s part of sprinkling in some musings about sonder and Solipsism.

This is most easily recognizable while Ushikawa stakes out Tengo’s apartment to keep watch on him, and starts identifying all the residents of the apartment building as he takes their photographs on his Yashica camera. Ushikawa himself takes no care to understand who these people are, deciding ultimately that their lives are boring, and going so far as to give them demeaning names and making up nonsensical (yet mundane) stories about their lives.

Murakami, however, in his narration, mentions that they all have their own lives that they run. In turn, he takes his own sweet time to literarily abuse Ushikawa, who is historically the most objectively ugly character in any Murakami novel to date.

Part of why this book is also about a 1,000 pages long, is that many sequences are written into the book that highlight everyday or monotonous routine activities. Murakami takes care to describe every meal that is made, to the point where it could be visualized as if it were from a Studio Ghibli movie.

The repetitive actions by Aomame while she lives in hiding from Sakigake also reflect Murakami’s conscious choice to include many slice-of-life moments in 1Q84. These moments, however (in my opinion), do not detract from the book.

The subversion of priority came to me when I realized that, whereas the protagonists seemed to be instruments of the schemes of higher powers (the Little People), it turned out that all of the major plot points were perfunctory, peripheral and contributory to the entanglement between Aomame and Tengo. 1Q84 is, at its core, a love story. A romance novel, if you will.

It becomes even more obvious that this book is mostly about Aomame and Tengo, when all of our questions — such as those asked at the opening of the article — remain unanswerable, even at the very end.

As an aspiring Physicist, I absolutely love the idea that our main characters here seem inexplicably entangled, like two particles in a quantum system. With nothing more than intuition and desire, they find themselves drawn to each other, ultimately finding each other after 20 years devoid of contact.

1Q84 is, at its core, a love story.

This distinction between background and foreground becomes more obvious, when Murakami finds ways to kill off or otherwise remove nearly every character that was in the fringes of either protagonists’ lives. In the end, it is quite literally just the two of them.

That brings me to the next idea: Duality. In 1Q84, there are plenty of pairs: Tengo and Aomame, Ponytail and Buzzcut, the Dowager and Tamaru, maza and dohta, Perceivers and Receivers, and most importantly, the 2 moons that signify the new, uncertain world of 1Q84.

This duality is also quite reminiscent of the similarly named concept in Physics; two seemingly separate things are in essence, two sides of a larger whole. This is evident in our protagonists, since they eventually come together (physically and literally) at the end of the novel. Ponytail and Buzzcut are two security henchmen at Sakigake, entrusted with the protection of the leader. Their partnership dynamic also leads us to see that they are inseparable.

It is imperative to mention the parallelism between the two moons, and the concept of maza and dohta. The second moon is smaller than the original moon, and is also a mossy-green color; it is, without a doubt, a moon nonetheless. This discrepancy in size echoes the ‘mother-daughter’ relationship between the maza and dohta, which are a real person, and a physical manifestation of their energy as a döppelganger respectively.

And of course, there is the duality of the real world, and the world of 1Q84. The reason why duality is the most apt descriptor for this pair of worlds, is that in order for Aomame and Tengo to have met, which was ultimately the goal of the 925 page slog, the worlds had to be complementary. They both separately made a smooth passage into the alternate world, and after all was said and done, exited it together, back into proper reality.

In a sense, the duality represents a system with 2 complementary parts, one of which is inherently smaller than the other in one way or another.

Another point is the comparison that Murakami makes between madness and the creative process. You can find a very eloquent analysis on that here.

Madness, anxiety and paranoia. These are explicitly mentioned in 1Q84, in part due to the isolation of the three main characters, each with their own reasons:

Tengo, who has inevitably lost everyone around him.

Aomame, who has to go into hiding for self-preservation.

Ushikawa, who holes himself up to stake out Tengo’s whereabouts.

It’s no wonder that each character is inexplicably visited by that mysterious, ghostly NHK fee collector — the corporeality of which remains a mystery — towards the last third of the book.

It remains a fact, and an annoying one at that, that 1Q84 ends off with many details left hanging in the air. Many people have come to their own conclusions, but as is the case with most Murakami novels, it is likely that there really isn’t one.

Personally, I’m content with the happy ending, and will admit that there were numerous points where I held my breath in suspense. I’m even surprised that this was translated from Japanese; it reads very assuredly and carries very heavy nuance in spite of that.

I would like to believe that there is some sort of connection between the novel that Tengo continues to write after Air Chrysalis and the real world, à-la-Inception. With that being said, I guess I’ll have to agree with the adage that Murakami coined:

“If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”

And I’ll bet an arm and a leg that that’s exactly his point for any question we have about 1Q84.