Reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Reality A and Reality B: 1Q84 as an Allegory of Our Time

2011-11-13T08:57:00.000-08:00

I am finally landing in Book 3 of 1Q84. The novel remains a page turner although I find myself feeling uncomfortable with my struggle to understand the whole of this work. Then I stumbled on a blog post by Jay Voss about the enduring value of the book at his blog called Viz. In his post, titled "Who said the book was on its way out?", Voss talks about the aesthetic power, and the value of the book artifact in this digital age. In his post, he alerts us to an essay that Haruki Murakami published in The New York Times in November of 2010, titled: "Reality A and Reality B". I just read it and find that it helps me with my understanding of Murakami's novel.

Murakami argues that our age, our mentality and the ways we read, write and understand stories has undergone a profound shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. Not only have political and economic structures shifted because of these twin events, but also the way we process, produce and disseminate information. It would seem that all systems have been dismantled, and that we have lost criteria for evaluating what is real and what is not. One of the metaphors for this phenomenon, according to Murakami, is the imagery of 9/11 itself, which though real, cannot be digested as realistic. The reality of our reality (in which 9/11 occurred) cannot feel as real as what we imagined the world to be like if 9/11, and everything that followed, had not happened. In other words, we live in a time of interpretive chaos, separated from key mechanisms for judging what is real. All of this impacts literature as well... how we read, understand and write stories.

Murakami writes that "the role of a story is to maintain the soundness of the spiritual bridge that has been constructed between the past and the future...fiction has always been assigned responsibility and questions to deal with in every age, but surely the responsibility and questions are especially great now...To transform the things and events around us into the metaphor of the story form and to suggest the true nature of the situation in the dynamism of that substitution: that is story’s most important function. " He goes on to describe 1Q84 as a metaphor for an exploration of the fundamental problem of our age, of the search for a new language for speaking about (defining, judging, tracing, evaluating) a new reality. In facing the conflict between realities (one real and one less real), what is gained, lost and learned? How do we digest the chaos of a new reality and adapt to it? These seem to be the questions and concerns that define 1Q84 in Murakami's own view. I love the way he closes his article: "as a hopefully humble pilot of the mind and spirit, I cannot help but feel this way — that the world, too, after a good deal of trial and error, will surely grasp a new confidence that it is getting it, that the world will undoubtedly discover some clues that suggest a solution because, finally, both the world and story have already crossed the threshold of many centuries and passed many milestones to survive to the present day."

Aomame and Tengo have crossed over into a world that seems real, but is a bit off kilter. They are in a reality that seems real, but is also fundamentally unreal in comparison the world they once new. The fall of the Berlin Wall took place in 1989, five years after 1984. The setting of Murakami's novel in 1984 situates it on the cusp of the profound, epochal, reality challenging shift that he describes in his New York Times article.

I am still wrestling with how to deal with the little people and the air chrysalis and many details. But I don't question their place in the novel. I just wish I had a filter, a way to make this unreality (or Murakami would call it chaos perhaps) more real and more comfortable. But if Murakami is right, then this too is a symptom of our present crisis: the desire for outmoded notions of order, hierarchy, transparent allegory and predictability.

--CHRIS

Everything is a Remix? Is 1Q84 a mashup?

2011-11-10T06:34:00.001-08:00

I am in the midst of book 2 but I want to hold off on writing specifically about it until this weekend.

1Q84 reminds me of a "mashup", a combination of disparate elements that is associated with web 2.0 definitions creativity. Mashup proponents like to celebrate the democratizing power of copying, parodying, mimicking and producing pastiches. For them, creativity is equal to combining pre-existing parts. One of my favorite mashup statements is the following video by Rob Wilson:

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

Wilson goes on, in other mashups in his series "Everything is a Remix", to make doctrinaire statements about the supremacy of mashups as a creative channel. I'm not entirely convinced. I agree with Jaron Lanier's argument, in You Are Not a Gadget, that Web 2.0, and Web 2.0 enthusiasts, overindulge in rehashing, copying and parodying, while "choking off" art that "presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic...something genuinely new in the world" (122). For me mashups are disposable culture; they are designed to be fleeting indulgences to be sent as email attachments or must see links, all in the endless hunt for the most web hits. I sound archaic and reactionary when I say that mashups are built on irony and can never create a world or authenticity.

Whether you like mashups or not, or believe in them as a creative medium, I found myself wondering about 1Q84 as a mashup. The thought began as a creeping feeling that the novel reminded me of Kill Bill. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, all brilliantly orchestrated. A little bit of assassin manga, a little bit of porn, a little bit of science fiction, a little bit of Oedipus complex, a little bit of science fiction and fantasy, a little bit of social commentary, a little bit of noir, a little bit of manga etc. It's delightfully absorbing, but does it mean anything coherent at all? Or is this a mashup designed to elicit readerly pleasure?

Maybe I am overwhelmed by the intellectual task of understanding what the novel "means." I'd like to believe that the novel itself argues that meaning is not so easily categorized.

There are some writers and artists who have the Midas touch as stylists: everything they touch turns into poetry (I think Gabriel García Márquez said this about Pablo Neruda, but I am not sure!). This is the case with Tarantino, Kurosawa, Murakami. They just cannot be boring, disengaged and uninteresting. But I wonder how much of Murakami's power is a function mashing up the familiar. I think he does to some degree, but with an important difference: he creates a slightly unreal world that we accept as readers, and realizes two characters in ways that are well rounded and humane: Aomame and Tengo. That transcends irony and disposable culture. It transcends the pleasure of the familiar to create something new and different.

I still don't know what this novel means. But I can't stop reading it.

--CHRIS

The Influence of George Orwell's "1984"

2011-11-08T19:13:00.000-08:00

For this, my first post on 1Q84, I want to focus on a paragraph that appears in Book 1 of the novel that provides us with a frame for understanding what Murakami is up to in his delightfully bewildering story:

"In his novel, George Orwell depicted the future as a dark society dominated by totalitarianism. People are rigidly controlled by a dictator named Big Brother. Information is restricted, and history is constantly being rewritten. The protagonist works in a government office, and I'm pretty sure his job is to rewrite words. Whenever a new history is written, the old histories all have to be thrown out. In the process, words are remade, and the meanings of current words are changed. What with history being rewritten so often, nobody knows what is true anymore. They lose track of who is an enemy and who an ally...Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime." (257)

We see totalitarianism in the parts of this novel that deal with the Sakigake cult and its mysterious leader. But we also see it outside of Sakigake in how Tengo is controlled by Komatsu, who may be read as a controlling Big Brother figure as well. Tengo is a rewriter of words, and in rewriting Air Chrysalis he transforms his reality into something confusing and uncertain, something that is not completely knowable. Tengo himself is a victim of having his "actual history" stolen, since he has lost his mother and does not know much about her, other than his erotic memory of her. But Tengo is complicit in stealing Fuka-Eri's history as well, since his ghost writing refashions her words and the meanings of her words.

I think 1Q84 is a commentary on the act of writing itself, among many other things. Chekhov appears more than once, as a kind of deity of plotting (if there's a gun, it must be fired at some point in the story). Tengo's central dilemma relates to authorship and authenticity. Aomame's dilemma is about reading or deciphering a reality that she believes has been altered. In this regard, she too, has had her "story" altered in a fundamental way.

So, the brief discussion of 1984 by George Orwell in Murakami's novel is a rich source of clues for understanding Book 1.

--CHRIS

1Q84 & Japanese Society

2011-11-08T07:15:00.001-08:00

Although as you said in an email that this is a very unclassifiable novel, I venture to say this is a sociological science fiction novel that comes down hard on many elements of Japanese society.

For starters, the parallel worlds are obviously a nod to recent theories that abound in Cosmological Physics regarding alternate universes. To this I add that the novel does a good job of providing that tension that comes between the reader and the character Aomame in so far as trying to discern what is the real universe and what is not. The tension is palpable. In Japan, where traditional old Japan clashes with modern technological Japan, that tension is all too real and those 2 worlds definitely exist side by side in much greater contrast there than in many nations around the world.

The novel's depiction of religious cults and their offspring, the depiction of the policewoman as being sexually "liberated" and thirst for kinky sex, and in many places the depiction of "Leaders" of any organization being either sexually deviant (they want to fuck society) or police chiefs being corrupt or even Kumatsu, who as a top editor will do whatever it takes to make the work come to life and publishable, they all come across as unconscionable individuals who engage in unethical behavior to achieve their goals. It's a social commentary on Japanese society for sure.

I also enjoy how Murakami is slowly telling us about the writing process in general. Little by little we are discovering how Aomame's world is constructed, but we have to read more and more about Tengo's life to understand Aomame's.

Another topic that interests me here is how Tengo, who knows from the start that what he is doing is unethical, goes ahead and rewrites Air Chrysalis, only to face the consequences that follow. I'd say that this relationship between an older professional and a young one is one of corrupting power that is prevalent in Japanesåe society. In that culture, typically the older (sensei) gets to dictate the course of life we know it, with the consequences that we are witnessing.

There is so much more to say. So why did Chekhov go to Sakhalin Island?

--DOUGLAS

Reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami: First Post

2011-11-07T14:49:00.001-08:00

In the past we've used email to discuss the books we read...books like War and Peace, Don Quixote, Frankenstein, The Count of Montecristo... but we're giving this a try instead! We'll see how it goes.

--CHRISTOPHER CONWAY