When both Aomame and Tengo likewise find themselves beneath two moons, and implicated in the murder of a sexual deviant cult leader who harmed Fuka-Eri, the characters begin to intersect and the plots to converge. Watching how Murakami draws in the elaborate strands to form a single weave by the end is a thrill; he remains a master of the steady, mesmerizing reveal, despite a penchant for excess recapping of story details.
The novel’s natural climax, a lethal massage-therapy session involving Aomame and the grotesque “Leader,” occurs at the end of the second of three parts. The final, and longest chunk of 1Q84 is a bit of a slog, especially as it ambles toward a fairy-tale ending where hero and heroine are finally reunited. Seven hundred or so pages might have suited the book’s intentions better.
But the bulk does serve as hard evidence of Murakami’s growing worry about contemporary Japan. Though westernized on the surface, right down to insisting on an English-language epigraph for the original edition of the novel, the now 62-year-old is foremost an astute, if deadpan, observer and critic of his native land. In both his fictional universe, and his Japan, there is forever a “serious shortage of both logic and kindness.”
The illogic, and cruelty, that fuel fanaticism is a theme he has explored before, most notably in a non-fiction work about a cult that released poison gas into the Tokyo subway system in 1995. In 1Q84, the extremist heart isn’t a Big Brother state – the references to George Orwell’s dystopian classic are more distracting than helpful – but End of Days cults who exempt themselves from ethical and societal rules.
Such willful exemptions, the novel implies, are at the cost, often terrible, of everyone else, especially children. The strained happy ending to this expansive, enthralling, but also over-long and occasionally exasperating foray into the lure of fanatical beliefs may be a corrective to the illusions and delusions that has proceeded it: All Tengo and Aomame really need to live, it turns out, is each other.
“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world,” that English epigraph reads, quoting from the Depression-era song It’s Only a Paper Moon, “just as phony as it can be,/ But it wouldn’t be make-believe/ if you believed in me.”
Contributing reviewer Charles Foran’s biography, Mordecai: The Life and Times, this week won the inaugural Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction.
