{"id":272786,"date":"2009-07-28T17:10:05","date_gmt":"2009-07-28T17:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/07\/28\/first-review-of-murakamis-1q84\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:19:43","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:19:43","slug":"first-review-of-murakamis-1q84","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/07\/28\/first-review-of-murakamis-1q84\/","title":{"rendered":"First Review of Murakami's 1Q84"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new Murakami book — 1Q84<\/em> — is now available in Japan, and this review at Neojaponisme<\/a> is the first comprehensive take on the book that I’ve come across. Long review for a long book that sounds pretty intriguing (if not in need of a bit of editing):<\/p>\n

\n

1Q84 sprawls 1055 pages in the hardback version and chronicles a large portion of Japanese history in passing, but the main narrative concerns just a handful of characters over a six-month period in 1984. Murakami uses his favorite device to frame the novel \u2013 alternating storylines with separate protagonists that become more closely linked as the plot thickens. These protagonists are Aomame, a fitness and martial arts instructor in Tokyo who grew up in a fictional missionary group called the Sh\u014dninkai (\u8a3c\u4eba\u4f1a, literally \u201cAssociation of Witnesses\u201d), and Kawana Tengo, a prep school math instructor and aspiring writer who has never met his mother. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

First, something is rotten in Tokyo in 1984. Numerous intrigues are described as usankusai (\u80e1\u6563\u81ed\u3044): fishy, shady or suspicious. An editor conspires to ghost-write a novel and have it win the Akutagawa Prize, Japan\u2019s most prestigious award for up and coming writers. A secret religious cult (loosely based on radical movements of the \u201960s and religious cults like Aum Shinrikyo) plots some terrible evil in its Yamanashi Prefecture compound. A wealthy, landed woman wages a covert war on misogyny. The world undergoes abrupt, strange, and highly specific changes, and that trip to the dark side of the moon is more literal than you might expect.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

These schemes draw in our protagonists like whirlpools, bringing in another key theme: hikareru (\u60f9\u304b\u308c\u308b) (to be drawn in) and related words make frequent appearances. Tengo is convinced to play ghost writer by his editor Komatsu, but he also admits to being equally drawn in by the book itself, which is titled \u201cK\u016bki sanagi\u201d \u300e\u7a7a\u6c17\u3055\u306a\u304e\u300f(\u201dThe Air Chrysalis\u201d) and written by the quiet 17-year-old storyteller Fukada Eriko. Aomame is recruited by the unnamed wealthy lady and drawn into her conspiracy. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

As Aomame and Tengo get closer and closer, their connection is revealed, and they seem to be fighting for similar objectives. The ending Murakami provides suggests that one of the characters might become \u201cthe egg\u201d cracked on \u201cthe wall\u201d of the system he referred to in his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize earlier this year, while the other may battle on and try to recover the past. By no measure is the action complete within the 1055 pages of these two volumes; the way things are resolved points to the final line of Anton Chekhov\u2019s \u201cThe Lady With the Little Dog,\u201d a tale of two lovers who finally resolve to elope at the end of the story: \u201c\u2026it was clear to both of them that the end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.\u201d [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Parts of 1Q84 rival Murakami\u2019s best writing. The tale of Tengo\u2019s father, who tried his luck as a settler in Manchuria before returning to Japan to work as a collection man for NHK<\/span>; Tengo\u2019s married girlfriend\u2019s ominous dream she relates to him in bed at the end of Book 1 (remarkably similar in style and feel to boku\u2019s dream in \u201cThe Twins and the Sunken Continent\u201d); and a story within the story about a town run completely by cats from a book that Tengo reads, are three notable examples. But overall, the book feels long, inconsistent, and occasionally repetitive. Over the course of 1,000 pages, characters and themes both float in and out of the narrative, many of them seemingly forgotten by the end of Book 2. Religious cults are discussed in depth in Book 1 only to be left out of Book 2. Tengo\u2019s father is an important part of the whole book, but it is unclear how his past is connected to the rest of the book. Ebisuno-sensei, Fukaeri\u2019s foster father, has most of his action offstage, and we never even meet Azami, Fukaeri\u2019s foster sister. Most of the book is spent going over the past of the characters, so much so that plot discussion more extensive than that given above would start to reveal some of the only development in the novel\u2019s present \u2014 plot that Murakami made no secret of trying to keep a secret in the run up to the publishing date.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new Murakami book — 1Q84 — is now available in Japan, and this review at Neojaponisme is the first comprehensive take on the book that I’ve come across. Long review for a long book that sounds pretty intriguing (if not in need of a bit of editing): 1Q84 sprawls 1055 pages in the hardback […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[23976,1836,6506,26186,1646],"class_list":["post-272786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-1q84","tag-cwp","tag-haruki-murakami","tag-neojaponisme","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272786"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313256,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272786\/revisions\/313256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}