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I’d better give an appropriate name to this new situation in which I find myself. There’s a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers. Even cats and dogs need names. A newly changed world must need one, too. 1Q84—that’s what I’ll call this new world, Aomame decided. Q is for “question mark.” A world that bears a question. Aomame nodded to herself as she walked along. Like it or not, I’m here now, in the year 1Q84. The 1984 that I knew no longer exists. It’s 1Q84 now.

One afternoon during lunch at work when I was reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami someone asked me what the book was about. “Uh,” I said and thought a moment. “Uh,” I said again, and then lamely, “it’s kinda hard to say what it’s about, but it’s really good.” My articulateness is astounding, is it not?

Now that I am done with the book and can see it as a whole, I can say that it is about a lot of things. Things like the nature of reality and love and time and fate and free will and and memory and stories. It is so very much about stories.

About three-quarters of the book is in alternating chapters between Tengo, a 30-year-old math teacher at a cram school who also wants to be a writer, and Aomame (her name means green pea in Japanese), a 30-year-old fitness instructor who also turns out to be an assassin of sorts. The last quarter of the book includes one additional narrator, Ushikawa, a private investigator. The structure is marvelous because it moves along two (and eventually three) separate but connected story lines. This also keeps up a certain tension and suspense nearly to the end of the book – not until the middle of the last chapter did I have any idea how it was all going to turn out.

So Tengo. Cram school teacher of math and wanna be novelist. He is a reader on a “new writers” prize and comes across a story called “Air Chrysalis” that has a certain something special even though it isn’t written all that well. He talks with Komatsu, an editor at the publishing house sponsoring the prize, who has also read the story. Komatsu comes up with the idea that Tengo should rewrite the story and Komatsu will sneak the rewritten manuscript into the selection for the judges. Komatsu, Tengo, and Fuka-Eri, the seventeen-year-old girl who wrote “Air Chrysalis,” will all be rich when the story wins and is published as a book.

Aomame. Fitness instructor and very good at her job. She secretly works as an assassin for the Dowager, one of her wealthy fitness clients. The Dowager runs a safe house for battered women. She started the safe house after her daughter committed suicide to escape the abuses of her husband. Aomame learned of a single spot on the back of the neck that, when stabbed with a very fine needle, will cause instant death that looks like a heart attack. She learned about this special and very hard to locate spot in order to avenge the death of her best friend who committed suicide in order to escape the abuse of her husband. The Dowager and Aomame make a great team. The Dowager uses her resources to set up situations in which Aomame can use her special skill on certain men whose abuses have been particularly egregious.

The publication of “Air Chrysalis” creates a problem for the religious cult, Sakigake, because the events in the novella are more or less true. It is a fantastic story about the Little People that no one is really going to believe, however, that is beside the point. Aomame is enlisted by the Dowager to kill “Leader,” the head of the cult because it turns out he has sex with prepubescent girls. Ushikawa, that third narrative voice, is hired by Sakigake to find Aomame.

This is the broadest and most pared down sense of the story I can give you and it leaves out l

Get there before December 12th.

Daniel Morales has read Haruki Murakami’s latest mammoth new novel, 1Q84 and tells all about it. It actually gives a lot away, so you might want to read some and then stop. But who knows when It’s going to be published in the United States, so you could probably read it and then forget it all when the book comes out.

Morales begins:

1Q84 sprawls 1055 pages in the hardback version and chronicles a large portion of Japanese history in passing, but the main narrative concerns just a handful of characters over a six-month period in 1984. Murakami uses his favorite device to frame the novel – alternating storylines with separate protagonists that become more closely linked as the plot thickens. These protagonists are Aomame, a fitness and martial arts instructor in Tokyo who grew up in a fictional missionary group called the Shōninkai (証人会, literally “Association of Witnesses”), and Kawana Tengo, a prep school math instructor and aspiring writer who has never met his mother.

I love it when Murakami writes big sprawling books: like A Wind up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. His short stories are good and I didn’t really like After Dark, but the longform gives him the ability to go anywhere with it. But Morales says that’s the problem saying it’s too long and repetitive at times. We will have to wait and see.

Instead of recent books I’ve read, I thought I’d discuss some of the books I haven’t finished this year. I’ve actually finished nearly all of the books I’ve properly started (i.e. not just read a few pages and decided it wasn’t for me) this year and was starting to think I’m either mellowing with age or getting better at picking out books. But recently I’ve had to give up, at least temporarily, on a few books that I’m sure are quite good but just didn't suit me at the time.

First up is Robert Grave’s Claudius the God. Despite enjoying the Big Read of I, Claudius and racing through the first half of this book, I just stalled and haven’t summoned enough enthusiasm to finish it off. I don’t know if it’s the thought of remembering the huge cast of characters or the dense prose but it’s time for it to go back to the library, perhaps to be borrowed out another day.

Then there’s a Josephine Tey, Privateer. This is a novel about the 17th century privateer Henry Morgan. Despite generally liking the setting and the idea of the story, I just go stuck half way through and realised I don’t have the interest to keep going. I can't point at anything in the book that's irritating me, it’s just not my cuppa tea.

A book that will probably hang around the house a little longer while I wait to see if I will go back to it is Green dolphin country by Elizabeth Goudge. I have just realised my library system here has lots of Goudge books (I’d previously only read the wonderful The little white horse) including adult romances like this one. It’s set in the nineteenth century and is split between the Channel Islands and New Zealand. Although I am interested in reading how Goudge depicted New Zealand, I’m not sure I can stomach much more of the unnecessarily complicated romance or the characters that seem to have had the same personalities and motivations etc since they were children.

Another book I’m still leery about returning to the library as I keep thinking that surely I’ll pick it up to finish is Haruki Murakami’s The wind-up bird chronicle. I think the writing is wonderful and have enjoyed what I’ve read but again, am stuck. I think it’s the length combined with the slow plot that’s stumping me. I’ll definitely try another Murakami even if I don’t finish this one off.

This past weekend, I saw the Takeshi Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. So inspiring! I'm a big anime and manga fan so the show was double the fun. I couldn't take pictures of the exhibit, but this piece was out in the lobby.
Check it out if you are in the area, but a warning to parents though: there are a few pieces that are definitely NOT for kids. But personally, I love art that is both cute and sinister at the same time.