Murakami’s Mega-Opus (Published 2011) (2024)

It’s April of 1984, and a young woman in a taxi is stuck in a Tokyo traffic jam. As she frets about being late for a meeting, the driver tells her she has an option: She can get out of the cab, descend a nearby emergency stairway and take the subway — but, he warns her, the world might never be the same. The woman abandons the taxi, walks down the freeway, takes off her high heels, hitches up her miniskirt, steps over the guardrail, climbs down the stairs and proceeds to her appointment. Whereupon two things happen: First, she performs a felonious act with a homemade stiletto. Second, per the cabby’s prophecy, she finds herself in, literally, a new world.

Thus begins “1Q84,” the much-awaited, 925-page novel by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. It is, for my money, a perfect opening: fast, funny, suspenseful, sexy, dazzlingly weird. The miniskirted woman — her name is Aomame — turns out to work for a clandestine organization that hunts down perpetrators of domestic violence and, shall we say, returns the favor. In her off hours, she befriends (and then some) a female cop, picks up middle-aged men for one-night stands and works as a fitness instructor at a local gym. Meanwhile, she tries to make sense of this new world, whose most distinctive physical feature is a second moon. That’s a nod to science fiction, where the archetypal marker of strangeness is two moons (or suns) rising in tandem over alien terrain. But it’s also a nod, from the jazz-loving Murakami, to “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” a stanza of which serves as the epigraph to the book: “It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, / just as phony as it can be, / But it wouldn’t be make-believe / if you believed in me.”

Like most Murakami novels, “1Q84” is fundamentally a detective story, albeit a distinctly heterodox one. (Murakami has translated Raymond Chandler into Japanese, and there’s a lot of Marlowe to his madness.) In this case, the central mystery involves Aomame’s connection to another character — an aspiring novelist, Tengo, who agrees to a shady ghostwriting deal: He will secretly revise a manuscript by a promising but unpolished 17-year-old, the enigmatic f*cka-Eri, so it can be submitted for a major literary prize. Gradually, though, Tengo realizes that the manuscript, “Air Chrysalis,” isn’t a work of fiction at all. It’s an account of f*cka-Eri’s childhood in a cult; of the strange, two-mooned world she inhabits; and of her experience as a conduit for a tribe of “Little People” — diminutive troublemakers who emerge through the open mouths of dead goats and sleeping girls, spin glowing cocoons out of thin air and stash within them some spiritlike part of previously normal human beings.

Don’t worry. I don’t understand it either, and I read those 900-odd — very odd — pages. Bafflement of this sort is central to the experience of reading Murakami, whose previous novels feature sudden sardine storms (“Kafka on the Shore”), malevolent, soul-stealing, hyper-­intelligent sheep (“A Wild Sheep Chase”) and unicorns grazing on a pasture deep in the unconscious of, basically, your average I.T. guy (“Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”). What makes Murakami’s voice so distinctive, and so electrifying, is that this disorienting weirdness is counterbalanced by a lavish concern for the utterly mundane. When he’s not exercising an imagination that lies somewhere due crazy of Tim Burton and L. Frank Baum, Murakami is the balladeer of the banal. He sings of traffic, toaster ovens, minimarts, spaghetti sauce. His male protagonists, Tengo included, are passive, ordinary and contentedly bored.

If Murakami is sublimely indifferent to logic, however, he is sublimely attuned to all things analogic. You can’t swing a cat in his novels — and, in his novels, it would be a cat — without banging into an analogy. f*cka-Eri hangs up on Tengo, mid-phone call, “like chopping down a rope bridge.” The applause on a live recording of classical music goes on so long that “it sounded less like applause and more like an endless Martian sandstorm.” I’ve never heard a Martian sandstorm (and I presume Murakami hasn’t either, although one wonders) yet the simile seems, in its strangeness, precisely right.

For most writers, analogies are a surface feature, a kind of literary accessory. For Murakami, they’re an organizing principle. His stories are an extended exercise in X-is-to-Y: “This world is to our world as. . . . ” For that reason, they often seem like allegories, but Murakami is after something more complex than a one-to-one symbolic substitution. He takes ordinary experience, cranks it through his astonishing what-if machine and produces a variation as moving and familiar as it is radically askew. As Tengo puts it, “The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form.”