SHORT STORY DISCUSSION GROUP
Our OLLI short story group recently read the brilliantly subversive anti-detective story by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The author has posted an excellent biography on his web site.
Reading that story inspired me to pick up Murakami’s novel 1Q84, and I’ve been slowly reading it for weeks.
Murakami’s writing style is almost boring, with its thorough recitation of everyday details. The inclusion of so many incidental bits of the characters’ everyday routines that seemed like deft and brilliant misdirection in “Barn Burning” impresses me less in 1Q84. Following just two main characters, the novel moves at a glacial pace, and I still don’t feel like I really understand the feelings and motivations of the characters, even though I’ve experienced repetitions of their childhood traumas and know in excruciating detail what they eat and how they cook it.
But as a structural experiment, the novel intrigues me to the point that I feel compelled to continue. It has been made clear that a gap in time, perhaps an expanse of alternate reality, lies at the heart of the book, and all the clues are pointing to this as a place where the two main characters will meet. The question that keeps me reading is whether all this detail will prove to be an elaborate feat of misdirection, ultimately equally brilliant and grander than the artfully placed incidentals of “Barn Burning.”
Here’s how Publisher’s Weekly describes it. Based on my reading experience of Murakami, the description “plainspoken oddness” is a perfect fit.
“Murakami’s trademark plainspoken oddness is on full display in this story of lapsed childhood friends Aomame and Tengo, now lonely adults in 1984 Tokyo, whose destinies may be curiously intertwined . . . Murakami’s fans know that his focus has always been on the quiet strangeness of life, the hidden connections between perfect strangers, and the power of the non sequitur to reveal the associative strands that weave our modern world.1Q84 goes further than any Murakami novel so far, and perhaps further than any novel before it, toward exposing the delicacy of the membranes that separate love from chance encounters, the kind from the wicked, and reality from what people living in the pent-up modern world dream about when they go to sleep under an alien moon.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)
