'1Q84': Murakami's Orwellian Best-Seller Now In U.S.

[RandySF]

Do you miss the girl with the dragon tattoo? Do you long for the thrill of following her adventures again through three volumes of exciting, intelligent fiction? If so, I have good news for you. She's got a sort of soul sister in one of the two main characters in Haruki Murakami's wonderful novel 1Q84.

Picking up the new book may strain your arms. 1Q84 (more about the title in a moment) checks in at more than 900 pages. But unlike a number of other novels that embrace both what we think of as the real world and the world of the fantastic, it will not strain your credulity. With more than enough narrative and intellectual heft to make it enjoyable for anyone with a taste for moving representations of modern consciousness in the magical realist mode, this story may easily carry you away to a new world and keep you there for a long time.

You may even fall in love with one of the two main characters, an attractive 30-something Tokyo physical trainer named Aomame (pronounced "Ah-oh-ma-meh," which in Japanese means "green peas") with a murderous avocation. In the fabled year of 1984, Aomame finds herself on the way by taxi to carry out an assassination (not her first) of a businessman singled out as a profligate wife-abuser and torturer, and when she gets stuck in a traffic jam on an elevated roadway, she exits the cab, scoots among the stalled cars, and climbs down to street level by means of a construction-site stairway that might as well be a rabbit hole.

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141460070/1q84-japans-orwellian-bestseller-comes-to-u-s

[Matariki]

1. I LOVE Murakami

Can't wait to pick this one up! Thanks for posting this ;-)

[murielm99]

2. Thanks for speaking up.

I was waiting for someone to recommend the author, or someone who has read this book. I did not want to begin such a huge book without hearing from someone familiar with the author or the book.

[Matariki]

5. Oh, he's fantastic

a bit of surrealism and very modern. I've liked everything I've read by him.

[n2doc]

3. You might be interested in the NYT story from last weekend

The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami


By SAM ANDERSON
Published: October 21, 2011

I prepared for my first-ever trip to Japan, this summer, almost entirely by immersing myself in the work of Haruki Murakami. This turned out to be a horrible idea. Under the influence of Murakami, I arrived in Tokyo expecting Barcelona or Paris or Berlin — a cosmopolitan world capital whose straight-talking citizens were fluent not only in English but also in all the nooks and crannies of Western culture: jazz, theater, literature, sitcoms, film noir, opera, rock ’n’ roll. But this, as really anyone else in the world could have told you, is not what Japan is like at all. Japan — real, actual, visitable Japan — turned out to be intensely, inflexibly, unapologetically Japanese.

This lesson hit me, appropriately, underground. On my first morning in Tokyo, on the way to Murakami’s office, I descended into the subway with total confidence, wearing a freshly ironed shirt — and then immediately became terribly lost and could find no English speakers to help me, and eventually (having missed trains and bought lavishly expensive wrong tickets and gestured furiously at terrified commuters) I ended up surfacing somewhere in the middle of the city, already extremely late for my interview, and then proceeded to wander aimlessly, desperately, in every wrong direction at once (there are few street signs, it turns out, in Tokyo) until finally Murakami’s assistant Yuki had to come and find me, sitting on a bench in front of a honeycombed-glass pyramid that looked, in my time of despair, like the sinister temple of some death-cult of total efficiency.

And so I was baptized by Tokyo’s underground. I had always assumed — naively, Americanly — that Murakami was a faithful representative of modern Japanese culture, at least in his more realist moods. It became clear to me down there, however, that he is different from the writer I thought he was, and Japan is a different place — and the relationship between the two is far more complicated than I ever could have guessed from the safe distance of translation.


more
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/the-fierce-imagination-of-haruki-murakami.html

[Matariki]

6. Thanks!

that was a great interview. I really enjoyed reading it.

[surrealAmerican]

4. Same here, have since "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" ...

... he's one of the most original and interesting writers working today. This definitely sounds like a must read.