Read with me: “1Q84: Book 2″

“One reviewer concluded his piece, ‘As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author’s intention, but many readers are likely to take this lack of clarification as a sign of ‘authorial laziness’. While this may be fine for a debut work, if the author intends to have a long career as a writer, in the near future she may well need to explain her deliberately cryptic posture.’

Tengo cocked his head in puzzlement. If an author succeeded in writing a story ‘put together in an exceptionally interesting way’ that ‘carries the reader along to the very end,’ who could possibly call such a writer ‘lazy’?”

— 1Q84: Book 2, by Haruki Murakami

Here we are at 1Q84: Book 2 which, if you’re familiar with high-concept mathematics, follows 1Q84: Book 1. I’d like to continue this series of reviews but, as before, don’t want to give anything away (the above quote doesn’t spoil anything, sensitive readers) so will encourage anyone who has read to the end of Book 2 to follow the link below to the full article whereas everyone else should . . . not.

1Q84‘s second book does what the middle segment of most longer stories does — pave the way for the conclusion while keeping up the momentum generated from the opening. This takes the form of Murakami throwing the sheet off of many of 1Q84‘s central mysteries, laying bare some of the more puzzling aspects of Book 1. This may sound uncharacteristic. Murakami’s stories are typically filled with plot devices that rely on the reader to perform the interpretive legwork but, while the main expository moments are perhaps more direct than anything else in the author’s body of work, these revelations are carried out in a way that still require the audience to grapple with immense conceptual explanations.

Rather than unpack the many riddles of Book 1 in a dry fashion Murakami wisely uses climatic moments to relate essential information. As we finally get to see Aomame confront Sakigake’s enigmatic Leader and Tengo resolve the strange psychosexual tension he feels in proximity to Fuka-Eri, we’re also given naturally revealed insights that function beautifully within these scenes. The fact that all of this occurs in a manner that feels so inevitable is evidence of a staggeringly talented author who, decades of experience having refined his skills, is operating at his current peak.

The slow delivery of a melancholy love story here also works extremely well. Reminiscent of Dance, Dance, Dance‘s void hotel room and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle‘s abadoned well shaft, 1Q84 sees Murakami, again, using the idea of “lost spaces” — sort of everyday purgatories where the rational systems that order our minds cease to exist — as a heart-rending contrast to the sense of communtiy we need to maintain our sense of self. It’s done here in wonderful slow burn, Aomame and Tengo slowly understanding just how intrinsically wrapped up in one another they are. Once again Murakami explains (in his most elaborate manner yet) how this perception of love — a paradoxically selfish binding of two people, alone against the chaos outside of themselves — may be the only way to survive a Dionysian world.

From my viewpoint, that’s what he’s also been writing about all along: an insane reality that is only made bearable by the strength of human bonds. That 1Q84 seems to be detailing this point more clearly than any of his other work probably makes this book the easiest to recommend for someone who hasn’t read Murakami yet and is wondering what all the fuss is about.

— Reid

1Q84: Book 2 also introduces the best euphemism for having sex I’ve read to date: “going to the town of cats”. Despite the fact that putting it like that is a pretty gross oversimplification of one of the book’s most fascinating concepts, I’m going to stick to it anyway.