“What a strange world. With each passing day, it’s getting harder to know how much is just hypothetical and how much is real.”

1Q84
Book Three, Chapters 13-21
By Dennis Abrams

To Ushikawa:

While we have known that Ushikawa is not, by any means, an attractive man, we learn that to compensate for it, he has delved into learning and knowledge. We also learned that he has a wife and two daughters, although he and his wife have separated and he hasn’t seen his children in four years.

He begins his stakeout of Tengo’s building, taking an apartment on the ground floor and photographing everybody going in and out of the building. (He is also proving to be a liability to all concerned, although he is not yet aware of the danger. Given this, the Leader’s statement that sometimes individuals appear in 1Q84 who were never to appear there takes on a darker meaning – is Ushikawa such an unintended guest?

I love how Murakami is making us feel almost sorry for Ushikawa and his move back to “square one.”

And his playing with everyone’s time frame.

Ushikawa’s photos – the sadness on everyone’s face.

“Even if I left this world, I doubt anyone would notice. I would shout out from the dark, but no one would hear me. Still, I have to keep soldering on until I die, the only way I know how. Not a laudable sort of life, but the only life I know how to life.”

Ushikawa watches Fuka-Eri, What is she looking at/for above the electric pole? Her KNOWING that he is inside taking photos. The pain of her gaze.

The collector for the NDK shows up at Ushikawa’s door. Why isn’t he seen leaving the building?

Ushikawa sees Fuka-Eri leave Tengo’s apartment, and she looks him in the eyes as she leaves, unnerving him while at the same time moving him spiritually. He returns to the window in his apartment, watching Tengo’s building through a camera lens. As he watches people coming and going, he begins to question whether or not what he is seeing is real, AND, if it is real, does anything that goes on matter?

When Tengo returns, Ushikawa follows him to a bar and then around the neighborhood. He follows him to the playground, watches Tengo sitting on the slide and looking up and then, after he leaves, Ushikawa climbs up on to the slide to see what Tengo was looking at and, lo and behold, sees that there are two moons. He suddenly knows that something has gone very wrong, and thinks of “Air Chrysalis.”

Ushikawa watches Fuka-Eri as she once again takes her stuff and leaves Tengo’s apartment. Once again, she watches him, and once again, he is deeply affected by her. “When that girl left, she left behind this void. No, maybe not. Maybe she just showed me something that was already there, inside me.” Is he in love with her? How does she know he’s watching?

At the playground, he climbs the slide and sees the two moons. “It’s the world around me that’s gone crazy. And I have to find out why.”

And Aomame:

Aomame now understands that reason and logic do not exist in 1Q84. By December, she is clearly pregnant, and is more and more certain that the baby is Tengo’s child. “If I’m pregnant without having had sex, who could the man possibly be other than Tengo?”
She also comes to realize that she believes in God. She isn’t just praying like she was when she was younger, she actually believes. People get in the way of finding God, she understands, and realizes that to protect the baby she has to recognize that she believes in God.

Her dream of the room guarded by Buzzcut and Ponytail, her fear that they were after her baby. “If need be, she would have no problem pumping all the 9mm bullets she had into Ponytail and Buzzcut. The God that protected her was also, at times, a bloody God.”

The NDK fee collector returns, once again pounding on the door and calling out to her, but Aomame does not answer. She speaks by phone to the dowager and watches the playground.

The fee collector comes back but Aomame still does not answer. Eventually, the man leaves. She speaks by phone to the dowager, who warns her about the man who had been watching Willow House (Ushikawa) and raises the question of why such an “unusual looking man, “he sounds like a colorful circus clown” would be sent to do such a job. The Dowager tells Aomame that on the night of the thunderstorm, she lost her anger – just as Aomame had.

Aomame listens to Janacek’s “Sinfonietta” and watches the news twice a day. She also begins looking at herself in the mirror, and for the first time in her life, thinks of herself as pretty.

She sees a man sitting on the slide in the playground, and believes it to be Tengo. But she sees on closer inspection that it is not. She nicknames him Bobblehead (we know it’s Ushikawa), puts on a jacket and hat, and decides to follow him. She discovers the apartment building he goes near and sees Tengo’s surname on one of the buzzer charts.

Aomame returns to her own apartment and calls Tamaru, who is unhappy she has gone out of the apartment. She tells Tamaru about Bobblehead, and about Fuka-Eri’s father being the Leader. She requests that Tamaru find out if the Kawana in the apartment is Tengo, and to see how close Bobblehead is to figuring out what is going on. Aomame also says that if any harm should come to Tengo, she wants to take his place.

Her lack of progress in Proust. “It feels like I’m experiencing someone else’s dream. Like we’re simultaneously sharing feelings…”

And Tengo:
Tengo ends up at the playground. He sees both moons, and considers the idea that perhaps they are a special message for him and him alone. He gets up and leaves and goes back to his apartment to read the letter Fuka-Eri had written him. The letter explains that she left because she knew they were being watched, but by whom or why was not explained. How she knew this is also not explained. The crow that Fuka-Eri described comes back and to the balcony. She also describes being able to talk to the crow.

The next day, Tengo talks to Komatsu on the phone. Komatsu has much to tell Tengo, and they agree to meet that night at seven. They meet that night and Komatsu asks about Tengo’s novel. Komatsu also reveals Fuka-Eri is now home with the Professor, and the missing persons report has been withdrawn. Komatsu assures Tengo his name will not be made public. Komatsu also reveals that he had been kidnapped by Buzzcut and Ponytail, which is why he was missing for seventeen days. To get released, he agreed to stop any further publication of “Air Chrysalis”

“What a strange world. With each passing day, it’s getting harder to know how much is just hypothetical and how much is real.”

Kumi Adachi, the nurse from the sanatorium, calls Tengo late at night. Tengo’s father has died. Early the next morning, Tengo travels to the sanatorium to discover his father has apparently died of heart failure brought on by the coma. Tengo’s father had previously arranged for a simple funeral and cremation for himself. Tengo then meets with a lawyer to go over the papers his father left behind. This includes money and a single photograph. The photograph is of the family, when Tengo was a year or two old.

Tengo also discovers that his father wants to be cremated in his television fee collection uniform. Kumi tells Tengo that sometimes, his father used to tap on the bed railing, like he was knocking on a door.

————–

I was intrigued and slightly puzzled by the sudden shift of focus at the end of Chapter 17, the section starting “Of course, it wasn’t a child that Aomame saw…”  It’s like a film that has been in close-up, but then the camera pulled back to show the big picture, a number of “ifs” — interesting choice.

From Strecher:

“If the metaphysical world is as real as the physical one (at least within the context of Murakami’s fictional world), so too the ‘sacred’ realm, as part of that metaphysical world, must be regarded as real. Ordinarily such a point would not need to be made with respect to Murakami, except that there is a natural inclination, particularly in ‘modern’ societies, to regard people who hear voices as mad. (It is an interesting point of irony that there is a greater tendency among people – especially those living in advanced industrialized societies – to place their faith in religious leaders whose faith is grounded in sacred writings rather than in direct sacred experience.) Perhaps this is because most organized religions exist at a comfortable distance from the direct experience of the ancient seer on whose teachings their belief system is founded. Then, too, it may be inevitable that industrialized people should be more comfortable with the sense of order that comes with organization and tradition.

But all religions must start somewhere, and if we think about the growth of some of the major ones – Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, for instance – we note that they generally began with a charismatic leader who claims direct experience and contact with a deity or deities. Certainly this was true of Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed. Even assuming that their experiences and instructions were preserved for a generation or two by disciples, fellow mystics or seers, eventually those teachings were codified, written down, and maintained by a priesthood whose ordained have little or no direct contact or experience with the deity/deities, but whose faith is grounded in the codified teachings themselves. This process it not confined only to the ancient religions; new religions and cults spring up regularly even into the present era, many of them offshoots of established religions (many Japanese cults, for instance, are variants of Buddhism, founded by leaders who claim direct mystical experiences). Invariably, tension is born between the established, textually based religions and the ‘new,’ experience- based derivatives, and religious history is filled with stories of burning or banishing as madmen or ‘heretics’ those who claim to have had a direct encounter with the deity. Joseph Campbell usefully describes these two phases of religious experience as those of the ‘shaman’ and the ‘priest.’:

‘The figure now in the primary role is the priest, who is an ordained official of the tribal or village deities; these are not of his personal experience. He is in the service of the society and its deities, for the priestly society. The shaman is an archaic danger. He represents the early mystic, one who has had the individual mystic experience and is supported by his familiars – his own special deities – whereas the priest is supported by and is in turn the supporter of the cultural deities. The two systems are inherently in conflict. The priest is the man of the book; the shaman is the man of the experience.’

What Campbell describes can also be expressed as the conflict between collective thought/experience and individual thought/experience. In the case of 1Q84, we see this best exemplified, sometimes explicitly, other times more subtly, in the conflict that comes to exist between what we will term true prophets, that is, those genuinely touched by the divine spark, and false prophets, who champion the sort of ‘myths’ of which Roland Barthes wrote, artificial constructs such as ‘morality’ and ‘justice,’ as well as religious and political ideological systems quite as though they represented absolute truth.

In fact, the structure of 1Q84 sets up those oppositions quite plainly, for divinely inspired characters are clearly marked with exceptional physical or mental qualities. Fukaeri, for instance, is marked physically; she is beautiful yet somehow lacks ‘balance’; physically she is small, but her breasts are unusually large and draw a great deal of attention. But most of all she seems simply artificial. ‘Her expression was devoid of the scent of life,’ Tengo reflects the first time he sees her. Other areas of her body, as we saw in the previous chapter, actually look as though they are not real. But Fukaeri is also ‘marked’ by her inability to communicate in the ordinary way, speaking in extremely short sentence, with virtually no intonation (difficult words are written in the text phonetically in katakana as a signal to the reader that they are more sounds to her than pictorial images or concepts). It is a point of humor that she always asks questions of Tengo ‘without the question mark’ (gimonfu o tsukezu ni).

In the context of our mythological analysis, we may associate Fukaeri’s difficulty in communicating through normal human channels as a sign that she is a direct receiver – the mouthpiece – of oracles, the first to hear the ‘voices’ of the gods (or of the Little People in this case) and to pass along what they have said. As with many oracles, however, these messages arrive in jumbled form – as riddles, as parables, in code – and are not intelligible to the uninitiated. Thus, the messages that emerge from Fukaeri must be interpreted by those with the gift of transposing the sublime into the everyday. Initially, Fukaeri’s ‘oracle’ is interpreted and transmitted in a primitive form by the teenage daughter of Professor Ebisuno, who provides refuge to Fukaeri after she has run away from the cult. The real task of interpreting and transmitting the contents of this oracle to the masses, however, falls to the Leader and, later, to his son Tengo.

Both Tengo and the Leader (who certainly is Tengo’s spiritual father, if not his actual, biological one) are marked as divine by their extraordinary physical size and strength, as well as their more intellectual gifts in language and reasoning. We recall that Tengo, upon reading Fukaeri’s story (as transposed by Ebiusno’s daughter), is taking by it in a way that he cannot ignore; the narrative has awakened something inside him, and when directed to rework the piece for publication, despite strong ethical misgivings, he finds that he cannot resist. Like Yoshiya [from the short story All God’s Children Can Dance], Tengo cannot deny the divine spark that he carries, nor can he escape his sacred task as a prophet, intermediary between humans and the gods. His editor Komatsu says much the same thing when he tells Tengo, ‘You’ll be the mediator, you’ll connect Fukaeri’s world with the real world.’ From the start, then, Tengo has been marked to replace the Leader, whose ability to interpret the words – the Will – of the gods (the Little People) through Fukaeri wanes as his physical body deteriorates. In the tradition of ancient animistic religions – including Shinto – the Leader performs the function of shaman, his experiences with the spirit world immediate and personal. As a holy man he intercedes between the earthly masses and the spirit world, interpreting the raw data transmitted through Fukaeri and transposing it into intelligible Law. And Tengo, in rewriting Fukaeri’s narrative for wider dissemination, has unwittingly already begun to take over the family business.

In mythological terms, if Tengo and the Leader are prophets and Fukaeri functions as oracular messenger of the gods, then Aomame fulfills the dual role of bringer and taker of life. Aomame at times strikes us as a series of paradoxes: she can be friendly and appealing, yet her grimace can cause children to soil themselves; she is a fitness instructor and nutrition expert who moonlights as a serial killer and whose best friend is a police officer; she detests the religion in which she was raised yet unconsciously appeals to that very same god when faced with sudden uncertainty. Aomame’s lack of consistency is physically marked by her breasts, which are of different size, symbolizing the two sides to her personality and her dual roles. She is a force of nature itself, monster and angel, bringer of death and (as mother to Tengo’s unborn child) giver of life. Even as Aomame uses her ice pick-like instrument to turn off the ‘life switch’ at the base of her victim’s brains, she zealously nurtures and protects the fragile and defenseless life that grows inside her. In fact, it is precisely for control of her womb – and thus control of her body itself – that the final conflict in this story will be fought out.

This leaves Ushikawa, the last of the characters I would identify as divinely marked, though readers may wish it were not so. Ushikawa, whose name means ‘bull river,’ is actually more of a doglike character, marked by his small stature and misshapen head. His appearance is particularly striking that he comes from a family of tall, well-proportioned, good-looking people. He alone is hideous, but is our best indication that he has been marked by the gods. Blessed with extraordinary instincts, a keen intellect, and a talent for finding things that are unfindable, Ushikawa enters the narrative as a temporary retainer for the Sakigake cult, which sends him to approach Tengo in order to rediscover the whereabouts of Fukaeri; later, in book 3, he is sent out to locate Aomame following the death of the Leader. However, while Ushikawa works for Sakigake, from a narratological point of view his role more closely resembles that of Nakata, whose task is to open the Gateway Stone and restore a sense of balance between the two sides. [SPOILER ALERT FOR THE REST OF THE PARAGRAPH!] Despite his unpleasant appearance, Ushikawa’s position is neither benevolent nor malevolent. This, however, is also why he must die; the balance must, temporary at least, be upset in order to break the stalemate and bring the conflict to a resolution. Like the Leader, Ushikawa is a necessary sacrifice.

The stakes in bringing about this reunification are considerable; they involve the establishment of the next generation of divinely sparked humans – beginning with Aomame and Tengo’s child – who have struggled their whole lives. Their task, which they must perform together or not at all, is to show the way by breaking free of the various ready-made narratives that have bound them until now.

As we have already seen, both Aomame and Tengo spent their childhoods under the care of parents who zealously adhered to rigid belief syste4ms. In Aomame’s case this took the form of evangelical Christianity, and she, too, was forced to follow these customs and rituals without question. Tengo was left in the hands of an equally zealous worshipper of the Japanese State – represented through NHK. His father’s loyalty to NHK is understandable; having returned to Japan from mainland Asia following World War II, with neither education nor family, Tengo’s father survived because he found employment – an actual home – with NHK.

Sincere as their parents may have been in their devotion to these belief systems, however, those systems ultimately prove unsuited to Aomame’s and Tengo’s needs, precisely because even as children their inner selves were intact; ready-made narratives such as organized religion and State ideology can only stunt their spiritual and emotional development. Their only hope of meaningful existence is thus to break free and continue to develop their own inner voices. As children, both Tengo and Aomame were pawns for their parents; as adults, it’s imperative that they live for themselves.

But do they? Herein, I think, Murakami sets a subtle trap for his readers, for while Aomame and Tengo may appear to have shaken off the shackles of their childhood restrictions and come into their own as adults, I would argue that, quite the contrary, in the process of escaping the evangelical roots in which they were brought up, both have run directly into the arms of a new manifestation of the same sort of ready-made narratives, in the form of the zealotry represented in the old woman and Komatsu. Aomame is still a pawn, an enforcer of the old woman’s campaign of vengeance against abusive men, meting out justice, to be sure, but whose justice and on whose terms? Tengo, similarly, is drawn into Komatsu’s game of revenge and humiliation against the pretensions of the literary and artistic community. Like Aomame, he got into the game for compelling reasons of his own, but in the end he serves as a mere tool advancing the agenda of Komatsu himself. Komatsu and the old woman, then, within the quasi-religious context of this discussion, represent merely one more pair of ‘false prophets,’ exploiting the gifts Tengo and Aomame possess to further their own schemes. Neither Komatsu nor the old woman are presented as evil per se; they are simply a new variation on an old theme.”

So what do you all think? Share your thoughts/comments/questions with the group!

My next post, Tuesday, November 4, the conclusion of 1Q84
Enjoy!

“But in the end you won’t be able to escape. Someone will come and open this door.”

1Q84
Book Three, Chapters 4-12
By Dennis Abrams

So…let’s begin with Ushikawa.

Ushikawa, trying to understand how the elderly dowager could be involved with the killing of the Leader, learns that she is a retired businesswoman who inherited the company from her husband, and then sold off its stock. Although he continues to dig around, the Dowager (real name Mrs. Ogata) is very private, and connecting Sakigake to Willow House is difficult.

So instead, he starts trying to find information about Aomame’s parents, as well as details about her job at the sports club. He asks a contact, whom he calls “Bat,” to look into those things. Ushikawa also discovers that Aomame is probably living in a safe house.

Bat breaks into the sports club and steals Witness Society information as well as information that links the Dowager and Aomame through a self-defense class, leading Ushikawa to surmise that they were both victims of domestic violence. He also learns that Tengo and Aomame attended the same elementary school.

Continuing his investigation, Ushikawa goes to the town of Ichikawa, where Tengo and Aomame both lived as children. Under the guise of working for the New Japan Foundation for the Advancement of Scholarship and the Arts, he learns that in some way, both Tengo and Aomame have made attacks on Sakigake, and that they have similar pasts, ranging from unhappy childhoods to escaping from home on athletic scholarships.

He also speaks to Mrs. Ota, the woman who taught Tengo and Aomame. She remembers Tengo as bright but burdened by his father’s strict nature, as well as Aomame’s depression from her parent’s strict religious practices.

And then there’s Aomame:

She reads and watched the playground until she goes to sleep, waiting for Tengo to come back. One day there’s a knock on the door, asking for the person whose fake name is on the nameplate. Aomame takes out her pistol, and the person knocking explains that he is a television fee collector. Eventually the man leaves, but Aomame feels wary about the situation.

Aomame begins learning Spanish – just in case. She dreams about thunder, about being nude on the Metropolitan Expressway, and of being in motion.

Tamaru calls and tells her that since the television fees are up to date, no one should be knocking on the door – is it a clerical error? Aomame asks Tamaru for a pregnancy test along with a book on pregnancy and menstruation; even though she thinks she’s pregnant (her period is three weeks late) she doesn’t know how it could have happened. The Dowager promises her that she will do everything in her power to protect her.

The television fee collector returns; he knocks and yells through the door, telling her that she won’t be able to escape paying her fees forever. Eventually, though, he leaves. Aomame sits outside after he goes, knowing that there is something inside her – perhaps a dohta, perhaps a maza.

Tuesday, before her suppliers return, Aomame writes to Tamaru to let him know the television fee collector has returned. She received her pregnancy test and learns that she is indeed pregnant. Believing that by killing the Leader life was formed inside her, she prays to God for help.

She wonders if Tengo might be the father, but can’t imagine how that could be the case. Tamaru calls to tell her that the television fee agent assigned to her area does not remember knocking on her door; therefore the man who has been knocking at her door is an imposter. Aomame tells him that she is pregnant. She falls asleep and when she wakes up, knows that she will safely bring the child into the world.

And finally…Tengo.

Nurse Omura thinks that it is kind that Tengo is reading to his father, and asks if she can sit in and listen. Tengo agrees, and continues with Isak Dinesen’s “Out of Africa” (WHY?)

Every evening, Tengo calls Fuka-Eri to check up on her. The fee collector continues to visit, and Fuka-Eri continues not to answer. (Same collector as the one visiting Aomame?) Tengo tries calling Komatsu, but he still cannot be reached. Finally, he comes back to his office, seeming different and more withdrawn. Tengo is invited out to dinner with Nurse Omura, Nurse Adachi, and Nurse Tamura. The three mildly berate him about his previous relationship with the older woman, telling him that someone like that normally doesn’t just cut off contact, which leaves an ominous feeling in Tengo.

Nurse Kumi Adachi and Tengo are drunk after their dinner – she invites him back to her place to smoke pot. While he is high, he sees a girl who asks Tengo to find her.

When he wakes up, he and Kumi are in bed together. She tells him that she has been reincarnated, and also tells him, before he goes back to sleep, that he needs to leave before the exit is blocked. Tengo now knows he is in a cat town, and that there is something there that he needs to find.

Tengo packs up to go back home and returns to the sanitarium to say goodbye to his father. He speaks to him, telling him about the summer and, convinced that it his father knocking on his door collecting television fees, tells him that it is no longer his job and he needs to stop.

On the train home, he realizes he will never see the “cat town” again. At home, Tengo finds that Fuka-Eri is gone, leaving the apartment immaculately clean and tidy. There’s no note, but he learns she left one with the friend who has been subbing for him at cram school. Tengo thinks about Fuka-Eri’s words, that Aomame is nearby. As he walks around, he decides he wants to go somewhere where he can see the two moons.

Some thoughts/favorite things:

So many “twos.” Two fathers, a father-son duo, Aomame/Tengo, two worlds, two moons, mazas and dohtas…

I’m still uncertain as to why Ushikawa has his own chapters now, unless it’s purely a technical thing to allow Murakami to tell us more about Aomame and Tengo.

Nice touch from Ushikawa using Occam’s razor to figure things out.

The dissipation of hate/anger from Aomame: “The anger she had felt before, like a hide tide rising within her – the overwrought emotions that sometimes made her want to smack her fists against the closest wall – had vanished before she’d realized it. She wasn’t sure why, but those feelings were entirely gone. She was grateful for this. As much as possible, she wanted never to hurt anyone, ever again. Just as she didn’t want to hurt herself.”

“This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.”

Is the NHK bill collector Tengo’s father? What does he really want?

Why Isak Dinesen? Is it linked to his reading of Chekhov?

The Macbeth reference. The three witches. Something wicked this way comes. Open, locks. Whoever knocks! – Why are those the only lines he remembers?

Ushikawa’s line “As long as I have these talents, no matter what sort of weird world I find myself in, I’ll survive.” – does that link him with Aomame and Tengo?

Aomame:

“Now much I can do about it,” she told herself. “I’m not even sure if this world with two moons in the sky is the real reality or not, So it shouldn’t be so strange, should it? That in a world like this, if I fall asleep and dream, I find it hard to distinguish dream from reality? And let’s not forget I’ve killed a few men with my own hands. I’m being chased by fanatics who aren’t about to give up, and I’m hiding out. How could I not be tense, and afraid? I can still feel the sensation, in my hands, of having murdered somebody. Maybe I’ll never be able to sleep soundly the rest of my life. Maybe that’s the responsibility I have to bear, the price I have to pay.”

The dreams: Thunder (the night she killed Leader/got pregnant?), the expressway (the transition between the two worlds) and the rambling incoherent one…

“There are a lot of doors in the world, and this one is not bad at all.”

“But in the end you won’t be able to escape. Someone will come and open this door.”

“She brought her hand down to her abdomen, shut her eyes, and listened carefully, trying to pick up the voice. Something was definitely alive inside her. A small, living something. She knew it.
Dohta, she whispered.
Maza, something replied.”

The whole hashish scene with Tengo and Kumi was pretty great. As is her having read Air Chrysalis.

Kumi’s smiley t-shirt. GREAT touch.

“My brain is vibrating.”

Being reborn. Leaving before the exit is blocked.

Aomame’s breaking her pregnancy down to her chorionic gonadotropin levels.

Would climbing back UP the emergency staircase work?

“The rules of the world are loosening up.”

Where did the three nurses go?

What happened to him on the train ride away from “Cat Town?” The sweat, the awful smell in his mouth…

From Strecher, continuing from my last post:

“Two scenes particularly stand out as significant in this regard, both recurring in book 3. The first comes early in the volume, while Tengo’s father still lives and Tengo spends the night with a woman named Adachi Kumi, one of the nurses who is caring for his father. Their night is potentially sexual – Adachi Kumi lies in bed with Tengo, rubbing her lush pubic hair against his thigh – and yet they do not have sex; instead, they smoke hashish (a first for Murakami characters), and Kumi, after confiding to Tengo that she can remember dying once before, urges him, in all seriousness, to ‘get out of this place while the exit is still unblocked’ [MY NOTE: Memories of Kafka on the Shore?] Much later in the work [MILD SPOILER ALERT] after Tengo’s father has died, Kumi clarifies that she was strangled to death on a chilly, rainy, lonely night. This, we have since learned through another character, is precisely how Tengo’s mother died, and we can hardly be blamed for wondering whether Adachi Kumi, now existing in the land of the dead, looking after Tengo’s father until his death, is not actually the spirit of Tengo’s mother.

In the physical world of ‘1Q84′, on the other hand, we find that the same kinds of mysterious conduits – what I term wormholes – that functioned so cleverly in Kafka on the Shore are even more explicitly depicted in this later work. We never quite see how Kafka’s inner shadow makes the metaphysical journey between Shikoku and Tokyo to emerge in Nakata’s physical self; we know only that it has happened, resulting in the death of Tamura Koji/’Johnny Walker.’ By comparison, in 1Q84 Murakami selects his symbolic imagery more carefully, turning the process into a highly sterile, ritualistic act of reproduction.

The most critical part of Fukaeri’s narrative concerns the kuki sanagi, or ‘air chrysalis,’ as the English translation has it, referring to a kind of cocoon. According to her story, the heroine (presumably Fukaeri herself) is punished for failing to look after a dying goat by being placed, along with the goat’s corpse, into an underground room. As she languishes there, the ‘Little People’ emerge from the mouth of the goat’s corpse and teach the girl how to spin a cocoon out of the air. Upon completion of the cocoon, it is opened, and out comes a perfect copy of the heroine. Similar to the room in which Asai Eri is trapped in After Dark, this ‘cocoon’ may be viewed as a real and metaphorical image of the womb, though this process of procreation is unnatural indeed, for it is sterile, involving no intercourse, an ‘immaculate’ conception in every sense.

If the purpose of the air chrysalis is to create human replicas, for what purpose is this done? We receive one clue near the end of book 1, in a rather unsettling scene involving a little girl named Tsubasa, allegedly one of the Leader’s rape victims, now under the care of the old woman who directs Aomame’s activities as an assassin. Tsubasa’s case is unusual even in the old woman’s experience, for her reproductive organs – particularly her uterus – have been damaged virtually beyond repair. The reasons for this are revealed only when Tsubasa is unwatched:

‘At length, her mouth opens slowly, and the Little People emerge one after the other. They appear, one by one, looking cautiously around themselves. If the old woman had awakened she would probably have been able to see them, but she was deeply asleep…When they came out of Tsubasa’s mouth, they were no larger than her little finger, but once they have fully emerged they expand, like pieces of inflatable furniture, until they are about thirty centimeters tall. All wear the same unremarkable clothing, and their faces are without any distinguishing characteristics, so one cannot tell them apart.’

Like the goat in Fukaeri’s narrative, Tsubasa is a replica of an original, and her function is to transport the Little People from one place to another. As it turns out, however, the Little People are not the only ones who have access to this means of transport. On the night of the Leader’s death at the hands of Aomame, Fukaeri herself becomes the conduit by which Tengo and Aomame are joined. In an atmosphere rich with metaphysical markers, Tengo senses that something is different on this night; ‘the air was dripping with moisture, and he felt that the world was marching steadily toward a dark end.’ In this perfect mixture of fertility (moisture) and death (the dark end of the world), Fukaeri enters his bedroom, and Tengo experiences an erection like no other he has ever known. Not wishing to commit an act of immorality with Fukaeri, who is only seventeen and under his protection, he ‘switches tracks’ in his mind, taking refuge in the sterile world of mathematics, eventually falling asleep. Upon awakening, he finds himself naked and unable to move, his erection unchanged. A now naked Fukaeri climbs atop him, and he is struck by how artificial her sexual organs look. ‘Where her pubic hair should have been there was only a mound of smooth white skin. The whiteness of the flesh emphasized too much how defenseless she was down there. Her legs were spread, so he could see her vagina. Like her ears, it looked like something that had just been constructed. And maybe it really had just been constructed.’ Using this newly formed canal to ‘envaginate’ Tengo’s penis, Fukaeri gyrates upon him until he ejaculates, sending forth his semen into the wormhole. As we later realize, it is at precisely this same moment that Aomame, on the other side of Tokyo, is using her weapon – a homemade, needle-sharp ice-pick tool – to pierce the Leader’s neck, pricking him at the base of the brain and ending his life. We presume that this forms the other side of the wormhole and that Tengo’s seed has passed through the needlelike end of Aomame’s tool into her hand and thus to her womb. Both Fukaeri and the Leader, then, have functioned as gateways to the wormhole, perceiver and receiver.

Interestingly, Fukaeri’s manipulation of Tengo’s penis – note that he is entirely in the passive position – is a verbatim reenactment of the Leader’s ritualistic manipulation by members of his cult using their own daughters. Whether these girls are their actual daughters or merely replicas of them, created in cocoons similar to the kuki sanagi Fukaeri describes, is never made clear, but in the end this is less important than the fact that the female sexual organs and womb serve explicitly as passageways to the ‘other world,’ either as wormholes that connect people in disparate locations (as in Fukaeri’s case) or as living cocoons, human hothouses in which to grow new life. What they seek to grow, presumably, is a new ‘chosen one,’ a sacred being who will take the Leader’s place as the ‘one who hears the voices’ of the Little People In this sense, when Aomame’s classmates teased her as a child, calling her ‘the One,’ they were unwittingly hitting the nail squarely on the head, for Aomame is ‘the One,’ possessing the sacred Womb that will produce an heir to the Leader, the next generation of divinely connected beings. And it has all been accomplished through the immaculate remote control of the metaphysical wormhole.

What we have seen in this chapter, above all, is that the metaphysical world as it is conceived in Murakami Haruki’s fiction has developed quite significantly since its inception in Hear the Wind Sing, and yet in other ways it has remained very much as it ever was. Certainly this realm has lost none of its underlying tension since Pinball, 1973, wherein Boku enters the freezing darkness of a chicken warehouse, wondering whether he will remain trapped there forever. From the terror of ‘dead man’s curve’ near the end of A Wild Sheep Chase, to the seemingly endless forest road to Naoko’s sanatorium in Norwegian Wood, to the gloomy corridors of the unconscious hotel in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, to the bedroom Tamura Kafka occupies at the back of the Komori Memorial Library in Kafka on the Shore, or the darkened hotel room wherein Aomame cuts the power to the Leader’s brain, these places are never insignificant, never innocent. No one ever ‘simply exists’ in Murakami’s metaphysical realm; even Okada Toru, sitting for days at the bottom of his dry well in the heart of Tokyo (a real and figurative conduit through the very center of Japanese society), experiences visions, considers major life problems, confronts his instinctive, primordial fear of darkness, loneliness, and death.”

My next post: WEDNESDAY, October 29, Book Three, Chapters 13-21

Enjoy.

“I will find Aomame, no matter what happens, no matter what kind of world it may be, no matter who she may be.”

1Q84
Book Two, Chapters 19-24; Book Three, Chapters 1-3
By Dennis Abrams

And so it goes. As does my love affair with Murakami and 1Q84

Let’s catch up with Aomame:

Aomame loves “Air Chrysalis” (was there ever any doubt?), especially it’s simple flowing language, language that she’s sure could only have been written by Tengo.

And finally, we hear the entire story. The heroine, who lives in a cult compound, is punished with isolation in an old storehouse for letting an old goat die, and on her first night with the dead goat, the Little People make their entrance through its mouth. They ask the girl to help them pluck threads from the air to make a chrysalis for something that is “coming” but won’t tell the girl what it is. They work on the chrysalis every night but still won’t tell her what will come out of it. (As Aomame reads the story, she senses a sort of inner illness caused by the Little People.) The girl is released from isolation and the Little People come to her in a dream, telling her to go to the storehouse to see the chrysalis break open.

The chrysalis, she sees, is huge and already starting to crack open. When it breaks open, she discovers herself inside. It is called a “dohta” and the original girl is a “maza” – the dohta is a shadow of the girl’s heart and mind. The two must be together to allow the Little People to have a permanent, living passageway into our world. She becomes a  “perceiver” conveying what she perceives to a “receiver.” The girl must not allow anything to happen to her maza, she is warned by the Little People. In addition, she is told to watch the sky for two moons, which will be a “sign.” But the girl knows something is wrong and unnatural with this, and runs away to live with a famous artist, an old friend of her father’s.

There, she sees the two moons and knows that her dohta has awakened. She begins to lose the people around her as a warning to return to her dohta, but doesn’t want to. Instead, she begins creating her own air chrysalis to see if she can enter the world of the Little People and save the lives of those around her. The story ends with the girl stepping into the passageway.

Aomame realizes that the story is real, and is, in fact, an instruction manual. She suspects that Tsubasa is actually a dohta, not a maza which has somehow escaped, and understands that the Leaders was having sex with the shadows of the girls, not the actual girls themselves. Aomame believes that she is now part of the effort against the Little People.

That night, Aomame sits out her balcony, drinking hot cocoa (for the first time in years) and watching the two moons. She thinks about the rubber plant she had in her old life and wonders why she is so concerned about it. Suddenly, looking down from her balcony, she sees a man sitting in the playground across the street looking up at the moons as well and in an instant realizes it’s Tengo (although she still checks him out with binoculars). She races down to see him, but he is gone by the time she gets there.

She decides that she wants to leave 1Q84 and is ready to die for Tengo, but she needs to visit one last place first.

Still no mention of the Leader’s death on the news (obviously it’s being kept hush-hush). Aomame dressed professional, puts the pistol in her bag, hails a cab and tells the drive to take the Expressway between Yohga and Ikejiri. Once again, the Expressway is full of traffic, and she has the driver let her out near the location of the emergency stairwell. (He warns her to be careful.) She walks, just as she did at the beginning, towards the stairwell, and discovers that while everything else as it was when she entered 1Q84, the stairwell is no longer there. She thinks of Tengo, says a prayer, and begins squeezing the trigger of her gun.

But she doesn’t pull it – she decides not to kill herself because she believes she heard a distant voice calling her name. She tells Tamaru she will remain where she is, she won’t have plastic surgery, change her name, or leave (at least until the end of the year) – instead she’ll continue watching the playground from her balcony. And although Tamaru and the Dowager are concerned, they bow to her wishes. Food and other necessities will be delivered once a week by supply masters, but Aomame is not to show herself to them. Tamaru also tells her that he has purchased for her Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” (YAY Tamaru!)

And then there’s Tengo…

He wanders through Koenji, and when he gets back to his apartment, Fuka-Eri tells him he has had a call from the sanitarium – his father has lapsed into a coma for no apparent reason so Tengo says he’ll go the next day.

Tengo then asks Fuka-Eri about the two moons. She says they have entered the world in the story together, because they wrote the story together. Tengo, Fuka-Eri tells him, is a receiver, and the two of them need to stay together until Aomame is found.

He presses her more about the relationship between perceiver and receiver. He theorizes that is why she let him rewrite the book, which was what began his shift in worlds. Fuka-Eri also tells him that he has changed, which he will find out when he goes to the cat town.

Tengo goes back to the sanitarium, where his father shows no physical response to the doctors. He realizes that his father not only wants to die, but that he is willing himself to die. But before he does, Tengo wants to tell him about his life. He has no idea whether or not his “father” can hear him, but he needs to speak.

He is occasionally interrupted by Nurse Omura who comes into check on his father’s IV bags. She has a pen in her hair, but the last time she comes in, and suggests that Tengo goes out to get something to eat, the pen is not there. When he returns his father in another room and in his place is an air chrysalis – exactly as Tengo described it. Curious as to what is inside he pries it open to discover Aomame’s ten year-old form. He calls to her but although there is an unmistakable warmth coming from her, she does not wake up. Slowly, the chrysalis disappears, along with Aomame. Tengo vows to find her.

Tengo continues reading to his father, and concluding that his father needs a deeper commitment, decides to stay near the sanatorium for a time. Fuka-Eri and Tengo talk on the phone, and she tells him that a crow (the one that visited Aomame?) comes everyday to the window. A television fee collector has also come around, but she does not answer the door. But, since Tengo does not have a television, he wonders why the collector is visiting. The man shouts “thief” through the door, which perplexes Tengo.

And then…suddenly…Ushikawa chapters?

Ushikawa meets with Buzzcut and Ponytail who want more information about Aomame. Ushikawa explains that there is no way someone like Aomame could have pulled off killing the Leader and then slipping away on her own – he knows that she must be connected to some sort of an organization. He has gone over her phone records and discovered a number of calls to a traffic division in a police precinct which is odd since he knows Aomame doesn’t drive. Ushikawa knows about Ayumi’s murder, and wants to see if there is any connection between Aomame and Ayumi. He also questions the two on whether the know the location of Fuka-Eri, and finds it odd that they have no interest in Tengo.

But when Buzzcut and Ponytail leave, it is revealed that Ushikawa knows a lot more than he has been letting on: he has Aomame’s private client list and has traced her back to Willow House, which he found to be very well-guarded. He is also curious about the Little People.

Some notes/thoughts:

The importance of “two” – two moons, two selves, two people…

Aomame, so strong and in control, is now like the princess in the tower, waiting on the balcony for her prince to come.

The connection between Tengo’s new world and the cat town. Nothing makes sense in cat town. The crow and the fee collector.

Why is Ushikawa now a major character?

“Near the usual moon a second smaller moon hangs like a slightly shriveled green pea [MY NOTE: Aomame?] My dohta must have awakened, the girl thinks. The two moons cast the shadow of her heart and mind. Her heart gives a shudder. The world has changed. And something is beginning to happen.”

“The look of the new moon was almost entirely Tengo’s creation.”

“This can’t be…What kind of reality mimics fictional creations?…There’s no way this can be…That’s a fiction al world, a world that does not exist in reality…Could this mean, then – that this is the world of the novel? Could I have somehow left the real world and entered the world of Air Chrysalis like Alice falling down the rabbit hole? Or could the real world have been made over so as to match exactly the story of Air Chrysalis?”

“Whatever the composition of this new world might be, I surely have no choice but to accept it in silence. There’s no way to pick and choose. Even in the world that existed until now, there was no choice. It’s the same thing. And besides…even if I wanted to lodge a complaint, who is there for me to complain to?”

The scene with Aomame watching Tengo in the playground was extraordinary.

“What should I do?”

Nice cliffhanger leaving Aomame with the muzzle of the gun in her mouth at the end of Chapter 23 – but why/how were the Little People chiming in?

Tengo/Air Chrysalis/Aomame – thoughts?

“I will find Aomame, no matter what happens, no matter what kind of world it may be, no matter who she may be.”

From Matthew Carl Strecher’s The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami:
“In time, Tengo finds himself enveloped by the world of ‘1Q84’ as well, as fact as difficult for him to accept as it was for Aomame. He is particularly troubled by the fact that this new world is virtually identical to the setting of the story he has created with Fukaeri. ‘Am I in the world of the novel?’ he asks himself when, looking up, he sees two moons hanging in the sky, precisely as he described them in the final manuscript. In time Tengo realizes, as does the reader, that he has internalized that world, so that when he writes – and later, even when he is not writing – he has difficulty keeping track of the various realities that swirl in and out of his mind, until the external, ‘objective’ world has all but ceased to exist, or more accurately, has joined together with all other language-based worlds:
‘He wrote a story in which there were two moons. A world that contained the Little People and the air cocoon. These were things he had borrowed from Fukaeri’s Kuki sanagi, but by now they had become wholly his own. While he faced his manuscript, his consciousness lived in that world. Even when he had put his pen down and left his desk, his consciousness sometimes remained there. At such times he had the peculiar feeling his flesh and consciousness were separated, and he could no longer distinguish where the real world ended and the imaginary world began.’
In a sense, Tengo expresses many of Murakami’s own statements on the act of writing, the dilemmas faced by the imaginative novelist who grapples with a vast array of worlds, all fictitious, but none necessarily more so than the ‘actual’ world. One hears in the passage above echoes of the author’s metaphor of descending into the depths of the cellar beneath the ‘two-story house’ of the imagination.
Through the simple fact of being declared, then, both in the spoken and written word, the world of ‘1Q84,’ with its two moons, Little People, and automatic weapon-carrying police officers, has come into actual existence: it is unquestionably constructed from words, from language, yet it has taken on actual, concrete existence – others inhabit it, and those who are capable of doing so remark on its peculiarity.
Interestingly, though privileging neither, Murakami makes a clear distinction in this text between spoken and written language, with Fukaeri and Tengo representing each of these respectively. The new world initially comes into being when Fukaeri speaks it to her adoptive sister, but its potential is not fully realized until Tengo has interpreted it and (re)produced it through the simultaneous act of reading and writing, lending it coherence and order. There is an underlying sense of the sacred in this joint act of creation, for Tengo and Fukaeri have assumed the roles and responsibilities of creator deities, and yet, as even the gods eventually discover, no reality lasts forever; whether grounded in the spoken or the written world, every reality is ultimately revealed to be shifty and impermanent.
And so, we might ask, is there a moral to this story? What can we learn from these texts? First and foremost, we may conclude that words are fallible, not to be trusted, but in the end words are all we have, and it is with words that we must construct and interact with the world’s various realities…”
And this:
“We have already seen that 1Q84 is centered on the gradual convergence of its two lead characters, Tengo and Aomame. The work’s title is derived from the name Aomame assigns to the ‘other world,’ the Q standing for ‘question mark.’ However, use of the expression ‘other world’ in this particular work is somewhat unsatisfying; in fact, it is more like a time slip or, as the Leader describes it to Aomame shortly before she ends his life, like a train switching tracks. ‘This is not a parallel world…Here the problem is one of time…the point where the track switched and the world became 1Q84.’ It would be most accurate, then, to envision ‘1Q84’ as a side step for time, not unlike opening one new circuit while closing off another. Murakami himself may have been concerned that his readers would misunderstand this point, for more than one character remarks that there can only be one reality at any given time.
Structurally, too, the world of ‘1Q84’ represents a significant departure in how Murakami handles the idea of other worlds. Aside from certain bizarre details – the existence of the Little People, a second moon hanging in the sky, police who carry automatic weapons rather than revolvers – this new dimension is virtually indistinguishable from the old, and while Aomame unmistakably enters ‘1Q84’ in the characteristic Murakami way, that is, via an escape ladder from an elevated highway, even she does not initially notice anything different. The eerie, gloomy, atmosphere that normally marks the metaphysical realm is nowhere to be found.
Or rather, is it be found in the ‘1Q84’ world’s own ‘other world,’ the characterization of which, however, is strictly imaginary: for Tengo, it takes the form of a ‘forest’ in his mind, which he associates with the unfettered imagination of Dickens, and of Chekhov, who wrote of the primitive ‘Gilyaks,’ aboriginal people who once inhabited the primeval forests of the Kurile Islands north of Hokkaido. For Fukaeri, this links them with the ‘Little People’ – earth spirits or deities similar to ‘Johnny Walker’ and ‘Colonel Sanders’ – who rule the forests with absolute supremacy and, when released into the physical world, bring with them a kind of elemental violence, expressed as torrential rainstorms and violent thunder.
In the actual physical world this realm comes to be known to Tengo as ‘Catsville’ (Neko no machi), named for a short story he has read about a man who gets off a train at a lonely stop along the line and finds himself in a deserted town inhabited solely by invisible cats whose language he can understand. Eventually the man realizes that this town is the land of the dead and that the cats are the souls of the departed. By then, however, it is too late; the tracks have been switched, and the train will no longer stop here to pick the man up. For Tengo, this name takes on a natural connection to the rural seaside geriatric center where his father lies dying, and as his father progresses through the final stages of life – from consciousness to coma, coma to death – the geriatric center and its surrounding town also ‘switch tracks,’ from a place of dying to the actual land of the dead…” (More on this later)

My next post: Tuesday, October 21st, Book Three, Chapters 4-12

Enjoy. And please…post/comment/ask questions!!!!!

“There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person’s heart.”

1Q84
Book Two, Chapters 11-18
By Dennis Abrams

And…let’s start once again with Aomame:

As she begins to work on stretching the Leader out, she is surprised how strong his muscles are, and wonders whether or not she’ll be able to go through with killing him. In fact, as she finds the spot and prepares to slam the needle into his neck, she hesitates. The Leader though, it seems, knows what she is planning to do and tells her to do it, once and for all, but still she hesitates. The Leader references the Little People as giving him the desires he finds himself unable to defy.

The Leader tells her that ancient kings heard voices and connected the world around them to those voices. That king was then slaughtered (or sacrificed more accurately) by his people to maintain balance between that world and the world of the Little People. But in time, kings stopped being killed and that essential balance was lost, and people stopped hearing voices. Aomame doesn’t believe him, so the Leader uses his powers to lift a heavy clock off the nightstand and let it slowly come back down. He asks to be killed, but now Aomame wants him to die a slow painful death.

The Leader tells Aomame that the Little People killed Ayumi as a way of sending a message not to kill the Leader. He also tells her that if she does kill him, he will not let Tengo be killed. And as a capper, he tells her that he knows about 1Q84 – but how could he know about that?

When Aomame asks the Leader if they are now in 1Q84 instead of 1984, he tell her that it not a parallel world – 1984 simply no longer exists for either the Leader or Aomame – for Aomame, the tracks to 1984 have been switched on her to lead to 1Q84; there’s no going back.

It seems that balance is key: the Little People can’t use their power without an equal power being used against them. And, as the Leader became a conduit for the Little People, his daughter became the counterforce against them.

In fact, it was by raping her that the Leader caused her to become the agent against the Little People, and she and Tengo, by joining forces, have created a way to stop them. The Leader tells Aomame that she was brought into 1Q84 because of her love for Tengo – a force of will – fate, in a way, is bringing everything together against the wills of those involved.

For now, the Leader is the only agent of the Little People – they have not been able to find a replacement and so they need him. “Air Chrysalis” has created many obstacles for the Little People, and Tengo’s new novel, inspired by Fuka-Eri, will create more, making Tengo their number one threat.

So the Leader offers Aomame a choice: if she kills him the Little People will leave Tengo alone and seek a new channeling agent, although Sakigake will undoubtedly hunt Aomame down. As of now, there seems to be no way to rescue both Aomame and Tengo. Aomame, weeping, kills the Leader.

Aomame places a blanket over the Leader’s dead body, then goes outside and tells the guards that he is sleeping – the usual reaction to her therapy. Buzzcut and Ponytail give her extra money, and after changing, she heads to Shinjuku Station. She gets in touch with Tamaru who sends her to a clean and spotless (almost antiseptic) safe house, full of food and regular household supplies. She takes a shower and thinks about the day, but mostly about Tengo.
.

The next day, there is no mention of the Leader’s death on the news, although Tamaru calls and tells Aomame that the hotel has been cleared out and there have been “movements.” – but what happens next cannot be said for sure. The Dowager comes on the phone and thanks Aomame, telling her that her new life is being prepared. Aomame tells her about the Leader’s last moments, and about his wanting death. Whatever was urging the Leader on was stopped by killing him, the Dowager explained. In the meantime, Tsubasa has still not been found, and Tamaru warns Aomame not to leave the apartment.

The reality sets in that Aomame has killed Fuka-Eri’s father. A crow lands on her balcony and then leaves – is it a spy for the Little People? There are new books in the apartment including “Air Chrysalis” which, naturally, Aomame decides to read.

And…Tengo:

Returning home, Tengo discovers that 1.6 million yen have been deposited in his account – undoubtedly from Komatsu’s front company for “Air Chrysalis” – he considers returning the money but postpones making a decision. Fuka-Eri is waiting for him, and Tengo makes them dinner. They hear thunder in the distance, which Fuka-Eri blames on the Little People. Tengo learns that the Little People have difficulty using their powers and wisdom beyond the forest and their world. For now, Tengo and Fuka-Eri are safe, but those around them (Tengo’s girlfriend perhaps) are not.

The thunder continues to build and Fuka-Eri asks Tengo to get into bed with her. He tells her the story of the town of cats, and Fuka-Eri tells him they have to go to that town together, adding that the Little People might find the entrance, because she and Tengo are one.
Now both in pajamas, Tengo and Fuka-Eri hold onto each other in bed preparing for what she calls “purification.” Despite the storm (and Tengo’s erection) they fall asleep. When Tengo wakes up, he sees that they are both naked, he’s not able to move (not unlike the Leader’s paralysis) and Fuka-Eri climbs on top and begins to have sex with him. When she finishes (and he ejaculates condomless) the storm clears, and she tells him that now he can relax. The paralysis fades.

The next day, the thunderstorm seems ghostly to Tengo, almost as if it had never happened, but he does remember being paralyzed and Fuka-Eri having sex with him. He wants to get in touch with Komatsu to return the payment, but, calling his office, he learns that Komatsu has not been in for several days. Tengo remarks that he might just be the next person to disappear, but Fuka-Eri tells him that he won’t, because she has purified him.

Tengo, finally, decides he wants to find Aomame. He figures that his best chance it to get in touch with the Witness Society, or see what he can dig up on his own.

Meanwhile, Fuka-Eri, despite her breasts, explains that she has never had a period. Tengo reveals to her that he wants to find a girl who he hasn’t seen in twenty years – Fuka-Eri tells him that Aomame might be very close by.

Indeed, she tells him, Aomame is hiding nearby, and that their time is limited. If Tengo can remember something about Aomame, he might discover where she is. Tengo decides to go out, and tells Fuka-Eri not to answer the door for anyone. He has a beer, thinks, and wonders if the Little People are after Aomame and what she could have done to them.

He also imagines that Aomame could have shared with the moon her secret feelings. He looks up and discovers that there is a second moon – just like in the novel he has started writing.

Some thoughts/favorite things:

Loved all the chapters with Aomame and the Leader. Her hesitation. Flow. Truth. Love. His desire to die. His knowledge of 1Q84 and Tengo. The slaughter/sacrifice of kings. Hearing voices.

The Leader is bound to his fate as Aomame is bound to hers.

Do the Little People exist outside of good/evil?

“There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person’s heart.”

The depressing view outside Tengo’s window: “The misshapen trees…Rusty bicycles…A nasty-looking old man was walking a stupid-looking mutt. A stupid-looking woman drove by in an ugly subcompact. Nasty-looking wires stretched from one ugly utility pole to another. The scene outside the window suggested that the world has settled in a place between ‘being miserable’ and ‘lacking in joy,’ and consisted of an infinite agglomeration of variously shaped microcosms.”

But then again…Fuka-Eri’s ears. And neck.

Another very specific dinner menu. Murakami loves doing those. And I love reading them. The grounding in reality.

“What does ‘real’ mean,” Fuka-Eri asked, without a question mark. Tengo had no answer for this of course.”

Of course Fuka-Eri would love the story of the town of cats.

The Leader’s explanation: “No, this is no parallel world. You don’t have 1984 over there and 1Q84 branching off over here and the two worlds running along parallel tracks. The year 1984 no longer exists anywhere. For you and for me, the only time that exists anymore is this year of 1Q84…We have entered into this place where we are now. Or the time flow has entered us once and for all. And as far as I understand it, the door only opens in one direction. There is no way back…For you, it was Sangenjaya. But the specific place is not the question. The question here, in the end, is the time. The track, as it were, was switched there, and the world was transformed into 1Q84.”
“It’s Only a Paper Moon” – “If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind…You were carried into this world when the train you were on had its tracks switched.”

And of course, around the same time that the Leader talks about

Tengo and Fuka-Eri joining forces, they’re actually in bed…um…joining forces.

Aomame’s choices – will she have to die to save Tengo?

Another death, another vacuum that need to be filled.

Interesting that Tengo and Aomame’s paths would never have crossed in 1984, but in 1Q84…

The Leader’s paralysis and sex; Tengo’s paralysis and sex.

Given the in-depth look at Aomame’s showering/cleaning after killing the Leader, is she now “purified” as was Tengo? Have both she and Tengo entered into new lives?

“In the course of this one day, several things have taken a decisive step forward, Aomame thought. The gears that have turned forward never turn back. That is one of the world’s rules.”

“What kind of world will be there tomorrow?” “Nobody knows the answer to that,” Fuka-Eri said.

Are “free will” and “fate” somehow joined?

“Is this the new world?”

Tamaru and the rat carver – why?

Aomame hiding like a wounded cat – love it.

So…the moment that Tengo sees the two moons while sitting in the playground – is that the moment he switches tracks? Or is it the moment he knows?

From Jay Rubin:

“Clearly, what Murakami was aiming for in his title was that it should be enigmatic, that it should be visually striking, and that it should have an Orwellian echo. Although the title evokes Orwell’s 1984, and both books begin on a chilly day in early April 1984, the novel 1Q84 cannot be called an homage to or a variation or commentary on Orwell. As a critique of the Soviet Union and totalitarianism in general, 1984 imagines one possible future. 1Q84 instead ‘looks back and imagines the past as it might have been,’ says Murakami, who points out that he is interested in examining the mentality of the era he lived through from a different perspective. Aomame and her beloved Tengo are five years younger than he was at the time. The student uprising that had been so decisive for Murakami was already a thing of the past when Tengo entered college.

There are six direct references to 1984 in the entire novel. Where the two books connect more broadly is in the theme of mind control. In both Orwell and Murakami, the rewriting and distortion of history come up for examination, but while the inhabitants of Orwell’s futuristic totalitarian dystopia are subjected to invasive state-sponsored mind control in all aspects of their lives, Murakami looks back on a familiar 1984 in which the most overt users of techniques meant to control the thoughts of their adherents are religious cults. Commenting on an especially severe cult, the character called ‘Professor Ebisuno’ echoes Murakami in Underground on the broad appeal of cult membership when he says:

‘What Takashima is doing, if you ask me, is making mindless robots. They take the circuits out of people’s brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do.’

Aomame herself was raised to be an unquestioning adherent of a stern ascetic Christian sect called the Society of Witnesses, which, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, forbids blood transfusions and preaches the coming of the End Times, but she abandoned the faith when she was eleven years old. Now, at age 29, it falls to her to assassinate the leader of another cult, the character in the novel who bears the closest resemblance to Orwell’s Big Brother because he is physically big and his followers take his word as absolute. Called ‘Leader’ (the word Ruda is used like a name in the Japanese text), he heads a faintly Buddhistic religious commune called ‘Sakigake,’ which means ‘Forerunner.’ Granted official government recognition as a religion in 1979, the fictitious Sakigake can be seen as the ‘forerunner’ of the all-too-real Aum Shinrikyo, the notorious Buddhist cult founded in 1984 that fomented the sarin gas attack against the Tokyo subway system in 1995.

Leader is said to have spent two years with a commune known as the ‘Takashima Academy,’ the cult decried by Professor Ebisuno as a maker of ‘mindless robots,’ where he gained the expertise to run his own commune. Likewise, before he founded Aum Shinrikyo in 1984, leader Asahara Shoko spent the years 1980 to 1983 gaining organizational know-how from the Buddhist Agon Shu sect. It was around that time that Asahara is reported to have told a friend, ‘Do you know what the number one money making business is? It’s religion!’ Murakami has called it a ‘total coincidence’ that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was also set in 1984, but clearly he has an ongoing interest in the period’s contrast between financial affluence and spiritual desolation and in Aum Shinrikyo’s claims to possess the ultimate cure for such desolation.

Sakigake is as walled off and secretive and controlling as Aum Shinrikyo. It gives Leader sexual access to young girls in the manner of Aum leader Asahara and many other self-appointed religious leaders, and though this religion’s Leader doesn’t show himself levitating the way Asahara claimed he could, he does demonstrate his powers to Aomame by levitating a heavy clock. Levitation is also mentioned in 1984 as a technique that might be used by the Party if it wished to demonstrate its powers, which have rendered the laws of nature obsolete.

Not only can Leader defy the laws of nature in this way, like the powerful Party member O’Brien, he can read minds and has knowledge far beyond that of ordinary mortals. He knows that Aomame has given the name ‘1Q84’ to the parallel world she seems to have entered, though she has only done so mentally and never mentioned it to anyone. He knows that she has felt strongly connected to a budding novelist named Tengo ever since she grasped his hand in an elementary-school classroom when they were both ten years old. He knows that they not only long for each other, but they picture each other whenever they masturbate. Further complicating matters, Leader knows that Aomame has been sent to assassinate him, and he welcomes the prospect of the painless death she offers him, promising to save Tengo’s life in return (though his religious followers will surely pursue and destroy her.) Only a god – or the author of a piece of fiction – could possibly be that omniscient.

The novelist Tengo, too, is physically large, suggesting that he rules over his created fictional world like a Big Brother, and Murakami draws several parallels between Tengo and Leader. At one point, on a fateful dark and stormy September night…

The year 1Q84 is presented not as an ‘actual’ parallel universe, as if Murakami is a believer in multiverse theories, but rather as an entirely made-up world, in which anything can happen because the author says it happens: he writes it that way, and therefore it is true. Of course, Murakami never states it this overtly. Instead, he has Aomame and Leader discuss the nature of the 1Q84 world in enigmatic terms. When Leader says that he knows she has given her own entirely made-up label ‘1Q84’ to the world in which she is living, this revelation is startling enough to serve as the cliffhanger at the end of the chapter. The next Aomame chapter (Book Two, Chapter 13) then picks up the discussion:

‘1Q84,’ Aomame said. ‘Are you talking about the fact that I am living now in the year called 1Q84, not the real 1984?’

‘What the real world is: that is a very difficult problem,’ the man called Leader said as he lay on his stomach. ‘What it is, is a metaphysical proposition. But this is the real world, there is no doubt about that. The pain one feels in this world is real pain. Deaths caused in this world are real deaths. Blood shed in this world is real blood. This is no imitation world, no imaginary world, no metaphysical world. I guarantee you that. But this is not the 1984 you know.’

‘Like a parallel world?’

‘The man’s shoulders trembled with laughter. ‘You’ve been reading too much science fiction. No, this is no parallel world. You don’t have 1984 over there and 1Q84 branching off over here and the two worlds running along parallel tracks. The year 1984 no longer exists anywhere. For you and for me, the only time that exists anymore is this year of 1Q84.’…

‘And in this year of 1A84, there are two moons in the sky, aren’t there?’

‘Correct: two moons. That is the sign that the track has been switched. That is how you can tell the two worlds apart. Not that all the people here can see two moons. In fact, most people are not aware of it. In other words, the number of people who know that this is 1Q84 is quite limited.’

Of course, when a fictional character says ‘This is no imaginary world’ and that ‘Blood shed in this world is real blood,’ what he is talking about is precisely the ‘imaginary world’ created by the author, a ‘proposition’ as ‘metaphysical’ as the ‘metaphysical soles’ of the Girl from Ipanema. Murakami is not saying that there are people in this world (the real 1984 or the real 2012) who are truly in touch with divine, and who therefore deserve to be spiritual leaders with a god-given right to control the minds of the flock, but rather that, only in a world with two moons such as 1Q84, can a religious leader actually perform the ‘same old tricks’ that religious leaders have used throughout the centuries to dupe their followers. In the world of 1Q84, the leader exerts his psycho-kinetic energy and lifts the heavy clock without wires or pulleys. He could not have done that in plain, old 1984. Perhaps the one more-or-less ‘real’ place where a trick could work would be early twenty-first century America, where candidates for president argue about the difference between a ‘religion’ and a ‘cult’ and claim to see Satan working for their political enemies.

Leader’s immense stature may be (at least verbally) reminiscent of Big Brother, but even he is in the grip of forces larger than himself. Indeed, it is strongly implied that he is a captive of those who worship him. A charismatic former anthropology professor who used to have a ‘visceral disgust for religion,’ he is now prevented from communicating with anyone outside the walls of the Sakigake commune by his former students and other followers. ‘there’s no longer any place for a Big Brother in this real world of ours,’ says the wise Professor Ebisuno. ‘Instead, these so-called Little People have come on the scene. Interesting verbal contrast, don’t you think?’

Sparked perhaps by nothing more than this ‘verbal contrast’ with 1984’s Big Brother, Murakami creates a cartoon-like race of Little People, who enter this world mysteriously through a variety of passageways (the muzzle of a dead goat…) to ‘pluck white, translucent threads out of the air’ and weave them into five-foot-long, womb-like cocoons called ‘air chrysalises’ that give birth to everything from alter egos to longed-for loves to a tangle of three angry snakes. For the most part, however, the Little People remain invisible in their otherworldly forest home, causing the wild thunderstorm on that critical September night when their fury is aroused. Instead of the Big Brother that Orwell posited, it is the Little People who control the system inside of which all of us are trapped, that same oppressive machine of which Murakami spoke so eloquently in his Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech. The Little People might be seen as a metaphor for the faceless bureaucrats who run governmental agencies, corporations, and religious organizations. On a still more universal plane, they might stand for the human genes that ‘ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation.’ ‘They have been called by many different names, but in most cases have not been called anything at all. They were simply there. The expression ‘Little People’ is just an expedient,’ says the all-knowing Leader. ‘My daughter called them that when she was very young and brought them with her,’ which perhaps explains why the Little People are like something out of a fairy tale (or a Disney version of a fairy tale).”

My next post: Tuesday, October 14th, Book Two Chapters 19-24; Book Three Chapters 1-3

Enjoy!