LOVE ME DO

Book title: IQ84

Author: Haruki Murakami

Publisher: Harvill Secker

Pages: 928

Price: 999

The “Q” in the title of this tome by one of the most acclaimed authors of our time stands for a “‘question mark.’ The world that bears a question”. In Japanese, nine is pronounced like the letter Q; so the title is also a pun on Orwell’s 1984. Presumably, the parallel universe at the heart of Haruki Murakami’s novel would elicit as many questions as the dystopic world of Orwell’s 1984 did. That is certainly true of 1Q84, if one considers two moons floating in the sky, weird creatures weaving chrysalises out of air or thin young girls with well-developed breasts to be intriguing enough in themselves. However, if one expects engagement with questions of a deeper kind — and expectations run high when the writer is Murakami — one is likely to find oneself led up the ladder, which is then snatched away. Using the image that is central to 1Q84, one may say that there are chrysalises aplenty here — promising speculations on appearance and reality, destiny and free will, art and the morals, love and death — but when they reach maturity, no ugly moths or beautiful butterflies flutter away. They prove to be as empty as the air out of which they are made in the novel.

That this should be so is quite strange, for 1Q84 has thought-provoking sentences that range from the profound to the funny and are sometimes profoundly funny in a po-faced way. Sample these: “Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely”; “Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might be someone’s soul being blown to the far side of the world”; “Time always passed slowly on Sunday mornings”; “Constipation was one of the things she [Aomame, the female protagonist] hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists”.

A sentence like the last one is likely to make you think that Murakami is being delightfully tongue-in-cheek, and there is a lighter side to the seriousness with which Aomame goes about bumping off abusive men or searching for the one and only love of her life. But however light-hearted Murakami’s attitude to the personal idiosyncrasies of his main characters might be, he is in dead earnest about their allotted missions in life, and therein lies a problem. Although the novel quotes Chekhov as saying that the “novelist is not someone who answers questions but someone who asks them”, Murakami does try to answer one or two. The futility of the attempt not only makes a joke of the purported solutions but also takes the wind out of the sails of the existential questions he asks.

The suspicion that Murakami is intent upon offering a substitute for a world of evil characterized by duplicity, religious prejudices and violence, mainly towards women, begins to creep in when he keeps harping, in paragraph after paragraph coming at regular intervals, on the oddity of the universe with two moons in which the protagonists, Aomame and her beloved, Tengo, suddenly find themselves. In the space of fiction, one world is as real as the other: Murakami would not have been so apologetic about such fantastic devices as the moons or the chrysalis-weaving “Little People” if he had not been anxious about underlining their falsity, thus delivering a moral judgment on them that robs them of the power to enthral. It is as if the author has lost confidence in the world he brings into being by a sleight of his hand, and must prove himself a good man, if not a good artist, by showing up the illusion he creates for what it is. One wonders what happened to the author of such books as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World or Kafka on the Shore, where the bizarre and the absurd serve to reveal the nature of reality. Perhaps the astounding success of Norwegian Wood, which is a straightforward ‘realist’ narrative set in the days of the students’ revolution of the 1960s, made him lose faith in the selling power of illusions.

This bashfulness about fictional techniques is interesting since the real action in 1Q84 starts when a 17-year-old girl, Fuka-Eri, writes a novel, Air Chrysalis, involving two moons and doppelgängers emerging from chrysalises, thus triggering off a chain of events that will end only when Aomame and Tengo are united with each other. The enigmatic Fuka-Eri insists that the Little People are real, and in trying to unravel the mystery of their identity, Tengo and Aomame, in their separate ways, are confronted with a cult, the Sakigake, whose activities are quite similar to those of the political system named English Socialism in Orwell’s 1984.

In the Sakigake commune, there is a man called Leader, who resembles the Big Brother. His trusted followers interrogate trouble-makers in bare, brightly-lit rooms reminiscent of the dreaded Room 101 in 1984 where Winston Smith’s brainwashing takes place. They have a huge incinerator on the campus that is akin to the “memory hole” in which rebellious spirits are made to disappear in 1984. In all probability, these allusions are supposed to be sinister, but in 1Q84, the good and the evil are uniformly trite. The villains are paper tigers, much like the “paper moon” — from the jazz song made famous by Nat King Cole that forms the epigraph, and perhaps the theme of the novel — that hangs on the sky of the 1Q84 world.

“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. ” That ‘belief’, held up as the passport to the real from the unreal, is one in love. Here is Murakami’s answer to all that ails humankind. Aomame can be as repetitive and Tengo can be as dull as they like to be — never mind the debilitating effect on the reader — but they have their author’s full support since they love each other. The moral of the story is that if one manages to sustain one’s belief in love even when the world is falling apart, one would be rewarded by being made into a true chrysalis from which the “little one of mine”, and not a shadowy double, will crawl out. That is to say, Aomame becomes pregnant with Tengo’s child, albeit conceived immaculately. There is the hope that hand in Tengo’s and child in lap, Aomame will pose for a happy-family photograph in the near future. The readers must believe this to be an achievement, since both Tengo and Aomame had lonely, miserable childhoods in which their parents never held their hands.

While there is nothing wrong in having faith in love, it seems a bit late in the day to begin now. Moreover, though Aomame repeatedly speaks of the dangers she has undertaken and the terrible trials she has undergone to find Tengo, the threats appear more conceptual than actual. One feels that to counter the influence of an authoritarian and murderous cult like the Sakigake, Murakami is creating a gentle cult of love in which women conceive without being touched, remain faithful to their original lovers even while engaging in group-sex with other men and women, and the memory of a 20-year-old touch is enough to give men erections. This is certainly cutesy and kinky, and will no doubt find favour with the youth who make up a large portion of the Murakami fan club. Alarmingly, however, much of this can be fitted into what the novel says of the Sakigake religion: “They’ve added some new-age spiritualism, fashionable academicism, a return to nature, anticapitalism, occultism, and stuff, but that’s all: it has a bunch of flavors, but no substantial core. Or maybe that’s what it’s all about: this religion’s substance is its lack of substance.” Predictably, while searching for love, Aomame rediscovers god, who, from then on, is installed in heaven and all becomes right with the world. The second moon dutifully disappears from the sky and Aomame’s swelling belly glows in the dark.

A host of writers, from Chekhov to Wittgenstein to Jung to Proust, are evoked to bolster up Murakami’s novel. Intertextuality (for instance, Aomame reads In Search of Lost Time while time drags in her private universe, and is sent madeleines as comfort food) serves to give 1Q84 a glitzy post-modernist feel, and that’s about all. Murakami has been lovingly called a “balladeer of the banal”, but he really outdoes himself here in places. A sentence such as “He [Tengo] began pumping slowly” can be said to set a new benchmark for inanity.

REVIEWER: ANUSUA MUKHERJEE

Published on April 6, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120330/jsp/opinion/story_15272638.jsp#.T4y9AoG-bCM