The novel opens in a taxi stuck on an elevated expressway in Tokyo, with the radio playing Janáček's Sinfonietta, and the narrator observes, with a dryness I have always admired, that this is hardly the ideal music for a traffic jam. He is right. The piece begins with a fanfare of such brazen, bright brass that it sounds less like the start of a concert than a regiment arriving to liberate a town. To hear it while trapped between lorries, going nowhere, is to be told that something tremendous is about to happen at the exact moment nothing can.
Murakami chose it, he later explained to Sam Anderson of The New York Times Magazine, precisely because it was strange. He had heard it performed live only once, with a small army of trumpeters ranged behind the orchestra, and the oddity stayed with him. He listened to it over and over while writing the opening scene. Then something happened that no novelist can plan for. The book came out in Japan in 2009, and the Sinfonietta, a work most casual listeners could not have hummed, began to sell. Seiji Ozawa, whose recording was among the beneficiaries, thanked him for it. I find that small episode more revealing than a good many essays on the novel: a single scene in a taxi sent a great many readers to the record shop to find out what disquiet actually sounds like.
I came to 1Q84 late, and in the British manner, which is to say in the wrong order and in the wrong number of volumes. The English translation, by Jay Rubin for the first two books and Philip Gabriel for the third, arrived in October 2011. In Britain it was published in two volumes, so that anyone who bought only the first could spend a winter believing the story broke off in the middle of a thought. That is not so far from how the whole thing feels. The Japanese original had appeared as three books across 2009 and 2010, and the first printing reportedly sold out on the day of release. The title itself is a joke that works properly only in Japanese. The number nine is pronounced kyū, so "1Q84" read aloud sounds almost exactly like 1984, the year Orwell made into a warning, now turned into a query. Aomame, the heroine, spells it out for herself: Q for question, a world that carries a question mark.
Aomame is a fitness instructor with a second occupation of great precision and no pension. In that first chapter the taxi driver, calm and faintly priestly, tells her there is an emergency stairway leading down from the expressway, and warns her that once she takes it, things may not be what they seem. She takes it. She climbs over the barrier in her tight skirt and descends, and nothing magical happens. There is no wardrobe, no rabbit hole, no shimmer in the air. There is only a slightly different Tokyo, in which the police carry different sidearms and, in time, two moons hang in the night sky: the familiar one, and a smaller, lopsided companion with a faint greenish cast. What frightens me about this is not the second moon. It is how long it takes anyone to notice it, and how easily everyone else goes on without looking up.
The other half of the novel belongs to Tengo, a cram-school maths teacher who writes fiction nobody publishes. His editor, Komatsu, a cynic of the most useful kind, proposes a scheme. Tengo will quietly rewrite Air Chrysalis, a peculiar novella submitted for a literary prize by a seventeen-year-old girl called Fuka-Eri, and between them they will make it a sensation. Fuka-Eri is dyslexic, speaks in flat sentences stripped of question marks, and turns out to have fled a religious commune in the mountains known as Sakigake. Her story concerns the Little People, who emerge from the mouth of a dead goat and spin a cocoon out of thin air. Tengo polishes it, it wins, it sells, and the thing he had treated as a fairy tale begins to behave like a report.
Here the literary joke turns inward, and it is the part of the book I admire most. 1Q84 is a novel about what happens when someone tidies a story that was not his to tidy. Tengo improves Air Chrysalis in every conventional sense: he mends its syntax, sharpens its images, makes it legible. In doing so he lets something loose. I have spent a working lifetime among translations, commentaries and scholarly editions of Asian texts, and I recognise the unease. Every act of clarification is also an act of appropriation. The editor who resolves an ambiguity has decided, on the author's behalf, which of two meanings will survive. Murakami, who has translated Raymond Carver, Fitzgerald and Chandler into Japanese, knows this from the inside, and I suspect the novel is partly a confession on behalf of every translator who ever made a difficult text more agreeable than it deserved to be.
Beneath all this sits a love story that, on paper, I ought to find insufferable. At the age of ten, in an empty classroom after school, Aomame took Tengo's hand, held it, said nothing, and walked away. Twenty years later neither has forgotten, and the entire enormous book is an elaborate machine for bringing two people within arm's length of each other. As a man in his fifties who once had his own heart taken apart, and who holds no great faith in grand reunions, I expected to roll my eyes. Instead I found the premise oddly bracing. Murakami does not claim the memory is magical. He suggests something plainer and more unsettling: that a single wordless gesture can become the fixed point by which a whole life is measured, and that this is not necessarily a sign of health.
The novel's most quietly astonishing scene is also one of its simplest. Tengo climbs onto a children's slide in a small park at night, looks up, and for the first time sees the second moon. From a balcony not far away, Aomame, who is in hiding, sees him sitting there. The weight of the whole book presses on that moment, and Murakami lets it pass. I remember putting the volume down and walking twice round the room, cross with an author for the first time in years. It was, I later realised, exactly the reaction he had engineered.
Many Anglophone critics were cross as well. When the translation appeared, Janet Maslin in The New York Times was withering, wondering aloud whether the novel was about anything at all and mocking its author for treating loose ends as someone else's business. Kathryn Schulz, writing in the same paper's book review, was more interesting. She listed the flaws with real precision, the repetition, the slack prose, the moral murk, and then conceded that the thing had lodged in her more deeply than most competent books she had read that year. On this side of the Atlantic, Literary Review shortlisted a passage for its Bad Sex in Fiction Award, which is the British way of confirming that one has been read closely. Steven Poole in The Guardian, by contrast, was generous about the final pages. The response, in short, was not a transatlantic chorus of frustration so much as a family argument about whether a novel owes its reader an explanation.
I understand the argument, and I share several of the objections. The book is too long, and it repeats itself with the patience of a man explaining a joke. Some threads, including the ominous NHK fee collector who hammers on doors, are simply left knocking. The treatment of sexual violence, on which the plot leans heavily, is handled with an awkwardness that does the novel no credit. I would not defend any of this on grounds of cultural difference. A clumsy sentence is clumsy in every language, and a scholar of Asian literature does his subject no favours by pretending otherwise.
What I would defend is the ending. In the last stretch of the book, Aomame and Tengo find their way back to the expressway and the emergency stairs, and this time they climb up instead of down. They come out into the traffic and the night air. There is one moon. And then Aomame notices that an advertising hoarding she remembers, with a cheerful tiger on it, seems to be facing the other way. Murakami does not tell us whether they have come home or merely come somewhere else. A reader trained on Agatha Christie wants the drawing room and the confession. The book offers a fire escape and a doubt.
The Korean response is instructive here. When the rights to the Korean edition were auctioned in 2009, the bidding became notorious. The advance paid by the publisher Munhakdongne was reported to be in the region of eighty million yen, roughly a billion won at the time, and in a roundtable for Kyunghyang Shinmun one rival publisher agreed that the contest had come to resemble a gambling den. Sums of that kind are usually a recipe for regret. Instead, the first volume, published that August, climbed to the top of the YES24 bestseller list within weeks and, by the trade's own reckoning, stayed there for some twenty weeks. The three volumes have since been reported to have sold well over two million copies in Korea. I do not pretend to know every reason for that. Some of it, surely, was the ordinary gravity of a famous name and a well-run campaign.
Yet I suspect Korean readers were also better prepared for that doubt than the reviewers in New York. Korean fiction has long been comfortable ending in fog. Kim Seung-ok's Record of a Journey to Mujin closes with its narrator leaving town on a bus, ashamed, having settled nothing at all. Hwang Sun-won's The Shower ends on a few words the boy overhears from his parents as he drifts towards sleep, and the reader is left to finish the grief alone. Both stories have long been staples of the Korean classroom. A readership raised on endings that withhold is unlikely to feel cheated by a painted tiger facing the wrong way. It may even feel recognised.
This is not an argument that the East prefers mystery and the West prefers answers. That sort of neat opposition is precisely the kind of bow on a parcel I distrust. It is a narrower point about schooling. Every reader carries a set of expectations about what an ending owes, formed largely by the books set before them at fifteen. Mine were formed by Stevenson and Conan Doyle, both sons of this city, who close their cases even when, as in Jekyll and Hyde, the solution is worse than the mystery. Murakami's Korean readers were formed, in part, by writers who close the door and leave the lamp on. 1Q84 happens to be a very long corridor with a lamp at the far end of it, and it matters a great deal which kind of reader walks down it.
Janáček wrote the Sinfonietta in 1926 for a great gymnastics festival, and its later movements took their names from places in Brno, the Moravian city he had adopted: the castle, the queen's monastery, the street, the town hall. It is, in its origins, civic music, a celebration of a town that had lately found itself part of a free republic. Murakami took that music and made it the sound of a woman stepping out of her own life on a stalled motorway. I have listened to the fanfare a good deal since, and I no longer hear triumph in it. I hear a question being announced with tremendous confidence and no intention of answering itself, which is, I have come to think, what the Q in the title promised from the very first page.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase the Korean Edition: 1Q84, Haruki Murakami (Munhakdongne), Aladin Bookstore
The English translation by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel is widely available in Britain.
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
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