The Thousands

Murakami has become serious. By serious, I mean he’s stopped tampering with sensitivities and started tampering with the ‘mature’ stuff of late night docos – cults, conspiracies and ethics. 1Q84 (yes, that Q there stands for kyu, ‘nine’ in Japanese), his latest three part novel, is one hefty tome. Though at first 1Q84 is hard to knuckle into, the rewards are plentiful. Set in 1984, the book looks back at that time piecing together fragments of history that collapse into the parallel universes imagined by Orwell.

One of the main protagonists (whose stories alternate throughout the book) is a tough heroine figure named Aomame, a martial arts teacher hired by a dowager to kill abusive husbands with an acupuncture needle who, you’ll be happy to know, finds Abba tacky. Oh, and she’s caught in an alternate universe. Then there’s Tengo, a maths teacher who is ghost-writing dyslexic 17 year-old Fuki-Eri’s book Air Chrysalis, which eventually hatches together the parallel worlds of the two main characters.

Littered with references to all kinds of factual events that get Murakami’d, these facts end up linking back to both narratives which almost does your head in, but the omnipresence of Murakami’s archetypal magic realism makes this whole parallel universe theory just that little more plausible and the book hell enjoyable. It features his typical motifs of cats, skepticism of dogma, ear fetishes, music, savants and sex. The moral – never to give up on imagination.