Haruki Murakami is a writer who has been in my radar for a long time. It also looks like he has been in the radar of the Nobel Prize committee for a rather long period as well but in time it has become a kind of recurring joke that he did not get the Nobel prize again this year.

His massive tome of a novel with 3 volumes, 1Q84, has been on my bookshelf for a couple of years and finally I got the time and the wish to read it.

The story starts in two threads. The first is the story of Aomome (green beans, a name similar to the favourite edamame beans) who is stuck in traffic and has to be somewhere shortly. Upon the suggestion of the taxi driver she takes an emergency exit stairs on the highway and uses the subway to reach her destination. We find out later that her job - if it can be called that - is rather irregular and clandestine.

In the second story, Tengo, a fledgling writer is coerced into a dubious scheme by his experienced editor Komatsu, in which he is supposed to rewrite the manuscript of an obscure young girl named Fuka-Eri, since the story in the manuscript - forming a novella - is very interesting and detailed but the writing style is quite bad. He takes on the work reluctantly and meets the girl, not knowing that he would be involved in greater and greater schemes, almost resulting in fraud.

The two stories seem to be going totally independently, until you start seeing some themes or images moving in between the two threads. The narrative also slowly moves to a creepy, almost supernatural path, but the way Murakami does this is very subtle and possibly that makes it even creepier. Suddenly he mentions little people, suddenly one of them laughs which no one but the author seems to notice and so on…

It turns out that Tengo and Aomome have been in the same elementary school when they were young and they had what could be called a childhood crash. It also turns out that the two narratives we’ve been following for Tengo and Aomome seems to happen in a different, a parallel world which is characterised by having two moons. With flashbacks we get the back story of Aomame, who was raised by parents belonging to a religious cult and escaped when she was very young to get away from the cult. Tengo’s back story involves his father, who was a fee-collector for the Japanese public radio-television company NHK (the father will also appear somewhat mysteriously in both of the stories).

The first two volumes have been published together in one book and they end somewhat indecisively. Murakami published a third volume a year later and brought the story to its conclusion, if it can be called a conclusion.

The third volume introduces Ushikawa, a private detective Murakami used earlier in his book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. He is tracking Aomome for the (other) religious organisation and he gets involved with Tengo as well.

There have been people placing Murakami in the magical realism family, but I am not sure. The style is certainly very exciting, the story is remarkable and at a basic level the story seems to have similar elements to that of great writers in this style reminiscent of Marquez and his 100 Years of Solitude.

The novel ends with uncertainty. An old and rediscovered love story culminates in a happy ending, but we’re not sure. We’re not even sure if the happy ending happens in the original world of 1984 (1Q84 is a variant on that) or in a totally new alternate reality. Murakami does not seem to care. The ending was reminiscent of some Philip K. Dick books for me, where the protagonist (and the reader) is not sure which world he/she is in. Of course if Murakami wanted, he could create a new narrative to fill in the gaps or continue some threads he just touched in passin

But this should not be dismissed as a SF/alternate worlds type of book, since Murakami tells compelling and good stories and has some interesting sub-stories and possibly he is just interested in telling good stories, which should be the only goal of an author…