We know what happens when Alice goes down the rabbit hole. But what happens when an assassin goes down an emergency staircase on a gridlocked Tokyo freeway after hearing Janá˘cek’s “Sinfonietta” in her taxi? This unlikely premise is the start of Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84,” set in 1984.
The assassin is named Aomame (“Green Peas”). “Some people would get the name … wrong and call her ‘Edamame’ or ‘Soramame,’ whereupon she would gently correct them: ‘No, I’m not soybeans or fava beans.’” Though her day job is personal trainer and massage therapist in a sports club, she takes assignments from a dowager who sometimes decides that an abusive man needs to be “removed” to another world. Aomame goes down the staircase because she’s going to be late for her next hit; but she notices almost immediately that something has subtly changed — policemen are now armed with automatic pistols instead of revolvers, the result of a shootout with a terrorist group she has never heard of. She decides that she’s somehow entered “1Q84—that’s what I’ll call this new world … Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” It helps to know that “Q” sounds like “9” in Japanese.
1Q84 isn’t very different from 1984 — except for the now-eliminated terrorist group and a creepy and very powerful religious cult whose leader is sexually abusing prepubescent girls. Aomame is hired to take him out in the most difficult assignment of her career.
About the same time, Tengo, an unpublished novelist, agrees to rework a poorly written novella by a 17-year-old girl and submit it for a literary prize. The novella, which has to do with sinister tiny people with supernatural powers, turns out to be true. The girl is the escaped daughter of the cult leader. The reworked novella becomes a bestseller under the girl’s name.
That’s just the beginning. In its nearly 1,000 pages “1Q84” combines elements of fantasy and thriller novels, as well as an undercurrent of social criticism of contemporary Japanese culture. 1Q84 is not so much a separate world as the same world with shadows made more visible — even the moon has a second, shadowy moon beside it. These shadows operate in a Jungian sense — as the negative things that we most fear and refuse to acknowledge and, by refusing to do so, make them overwhelmingly powerful. It’s not an accident that Murakami chose the year 1984 – he’s referring to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, itself a shadow of our modern world.
Murakami’s novel is compelling. There’s an air of mystery that starts from the first line, deepened by his deadpan style of describing scenes, conversations and inner thoughts repetitively and at length. This lends an ominous weight to the mundane and insists that the reader stop and think about what has happened. Although there are often flashes of humor, the tone gets more serious as the novel proceeds.
The story is deepened by the conscious use of the shadow archetype. 1Q84 is a world in which our fears — of terrorism and religious authoritarianism, in particular, but also of the supernatural — have come to play a major role. This theme of shadows permeates the plot. The cult uses its supernatural connections to create “shadows” of young girls. Both Aomame and Tengo grew up “shadowing” their parents: They were forced to follow them around door-to-door, Aomame because her parents were something like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Tengo because his father was a fee collector for the national TV company. Even their parents had become shadows to the people around them, representing something that people don’t want to face.
Murakami introduces a third major character, Ushikawa, halfway through the book; Ushikawa is a private investigator — a professional shadow — who is trying to find Aomame after she kills the cult’s leader. Ushikawa adds to the tension and fits the theme, but his involvement seems superfluous: His main plot function seems to be to bring Tengo and Aomame, who have not seen each other since childhood, together again.
In “1Q84,” spaces left empty are filled with something negative — essentially, with shadows. Murakami portrays a Tokyo that has lost a sense of cultural identity and been filled with outside, mostly Western, influences. Along with these have come more sinister things.
While all three main characters’ lives are somewhat marginalized, Murakami implies that it is precisely because of this that they can see the shadows around them for what they are. There seems to be a choice between being someone like Ushikawa, who uses his marginality for profit, and being someone like Aomame or Tengo, who lead simple, if lonely, lives and don’t need anything more — except to find somebody who can see them as real people.
Eventually, the story is resolved in a very traditional way, as Tengo and Aomame finally find each other. If “1Q84” is the shadow of 1984, it seems that we must learn to face our fears and our shadows if we don’t want those shadows to become true nightmares. We must transcend them with kindness, compassion and love.