From my first day in the outlandish world of Haruki Murakami to the day I completed his most time-consuming and ambitious novel, 1Q84, he became both my most intense literary attraction and my most vexing source of literary frustration. During those seven months—and consider yourself served with a data geek trigger warning—I read 38 books by 28 different authors. Of those books, seven were by or about Murakami. He was my reading companion for fully half of those 150 days, and counting the two titles I completed after I first wrote this essay, I have now read more pages of Murakami in my lifetime (4,164) than of any other author. I have now read more pages by Murakami than by Toni Morrison (10 books), E.M. Forster (five), or even Fyodor Dostoevsky (seven). The attractions of Murakami can be distilled into four categories: his bewitching narrative talent, probing thematic exploration, delightful supernatural weirdness, and Western cultural fluency. If the “pro” side of the ledger is impressive, the “con” side is daunting. It consists of his graphic sexual obsession, serial misogyny, and suspected underlying superficiality. 1Q84 provides a fine case study for both sides of the ledger—and left me wondering whether I’d squandered 4,000 pages of reading time on a peddler of delicious literary snake oil.
BEWITCHING NARRATIVE TALENT
Though 1Q84 is not nearly as narratively rewarding as top-tier Murakami, it still exhibits his undeniable gifts as a storyteller. Throughout the first two of the three 400-page volumes, the third-person narrative alternates between two protagonists. The “Aomame” chapters are about a female physical therapist who moonlights as an assassin of domestic abusers. The “Tengo” chapters feature a math professor at a “cram school” (test prep academy) who moonlights as an up-and-coming novelist. In the third volume Murakami inserts a third wheel to the rotation: the obsequious corporate gumshoe Ushikawa, a refurbished extra from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle who ranks with Satoru Nakata (Kafka on the Shore) among Murakami’s most original creations. The story begins to cook when Aomame is asked to off the leader of a religious cult that has been exposed to the public in a novel ghostwritten by Tengo. It’s a loopy plot, told with little narrative restraint, but the pages fly by.
PROBING THEMATIC EXPLORATION
Murakami dips a toe into several genres (science fiction, mystery, romance), but most observers place him firmly in the literary fiction camp due to his introspective thematic interests. 1Q84 questions society’s ability to hold sexual predators accountable and asks if vigilante justice is a viable option. It also pokes at the boundaries between reality and fiction. But I was most intrigued by its contrast between the controlling God worshipped by the book’s religious fundamentalists and the passive-but-permeating God that Aomame comes to know. The former forbids life-saving blood transfusions, creates distance within families, and seems more concerned with public relations than spiritual enlightenment. The latter “doesn’t give and doesn’t take away” but soothes a victim’s consuming righteous anger with unwavering quiet companionship. Murakami finds his thesis in an inscription at psychoanalyst Karl Jung’s home: “Cold or Not, God is Present.”
DELIGHTFUL SUPERNATURAL WEIRDNESS
However, most accomplished authors tell compelling stories and explore weighty themes. What really sets Murakami apart is his winking magical realism. While 1Q84 lacks the quirky brilliance of Kafka’s talking cats and raining fish, it does offer tiny spiritual beings that pop out of a dead goat. It also establishes a parallel Earth, which Aomame calls “the year 1Q84”; this is apparently a Japanese pun that doesn’t translate. The most salient symptom of 1Q84 is that our planet has sprouted a second moon. This dreamlike surrealism, rendered with a matter-of-fact tone reminiscent of Murakami’s filmmaking countryman Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), is usually the most enjoyable facet of the Murakami formula.
WESTERN CULTURAL FLUENCY
The appeal of this distinctively Japanese strangeness is rivaled only by the appeal of the wide-ranging Western cultural allusions. 1Q84 features a lengthy passage from Anton Chekhov’s scientific travelogue Sakhalin Island. It provides a brief biological sketch of the baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann. One of its supporting characters is a 17-year-old who seemingly has no hobbies apart from listening to Duke Ellington on vinyl. My favorite allusion is literary advice from Aomame’s badass bodyguard Tamaru, to my knowledge the most notable queer presence in the Murakami Cinematic Universe. “I’ve never been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can’t read the whole of Proust.”
I was lured into braving this 1,200-page epic after I asked ChatGPT to recommend my next Murakami read. It confidently assured me that the novel echoed the Enlightenment message of The Magic Flute. That proved to be an unusually vivid hallucination; it had confused Mozart’s opera with Janáček’s Sinfonietta. Still, a sci-fi tinged romance inspired by Sarastro and the Queen of the Night was a perfectly plausible misrepresentation of Murakami. His work bubbles with high-culture fanboy tangents that have turned me on to the pleasures of Sibelius’s 5th Symphony, the films of Francois Truffaut, and Beethoven’s Archduke Trio. Moreover, these allusions are seldom gimmicky one-offs. They are usually integrated thoughtfully into the narrative.
GRAPHIC SEXUAL OBSESSION
In enumerating the less savory characteristics of Murakami’s fiction, I hesitate to include his persistent interest in the sex lives of his characters. I am sometimes troubled by an increasingly prudish streak in 21st century artistic discourse, particularly on social media. The shift is largely generational, and it seems prompted—and to some extent justified—by an increasing impatience with chronic male misbehavior. But while most of Murakami’s novels contain graphic descriptions of sexual activity, they are probably not much racier than the celebrated works of John Updike, Milan Kundera, or D.H. Lawrence. Much of the strongly worded condemnation of Murakami’s sexual obsessions reflects this widening gap in generational values. The guy is a product of the free love generation, not the #MeToo generation, and it’s worth bearing that in mind. That said, I personally could do with fewer references to penetration, oral goings-on, and genitalia. 1Q84 is no exception.
SERIAL MISOGYNY
What I find exponentially more disappointing than the frank sexuality is my consistent inability to defend Murakami against charges of misogyny. It has been a problem with almost every Murakami book I’ve experienced. Reading the short story “An Independent Organ,” I was shocked at the casual way the male characters accept the preposterous suggestion that women are biologically prone to mendacity. The idea is not even dramatically germane, but Murakami serves it up earnestly as potentially sagacious insight. I get that the teen hero’s conquest of his mother in Kafka on the Shore supports the novel’s Oedipal themes, but does he have to dream-rape his sister? Kafka also contains a revealing scene in which a trans woman puts a nasty feminist firmly in her place. This scene’s heavy-handed depiction of myopic political correctness feels like a strawman: Do Japanese feminists really complain about unfavorable placement of female authors on library bookshelves? It’s not an ironic question: the extent to which Murakami’s attitudes toward women are rooted in Japanese gender hierarchies is difficult for a stateside reader like me to evaluate, and that complicates the moral judgment. But one thing is clear: 1Q84 should have been the book that acquitted Murakami of egregious misogyny. Aomame is probably his strongest female protagonist, not only tough as nails but also a warrior for feminist justice. The problem is that Murakami keeps undermining her. I don’t mind that she is sexually aggressive, or that she likes anonymous, emotionally meaningless sex, but it’s hard to think of a textual defense for a sixty-year-old man inventing a conventionally attractive young woman who fetishizes conventionally unattractive men old enough to be her father—or her author. Particularly when many of the thoughts he puts in her head are about the inadequate size of her breasts.
Aomame’s feminist agency is further undermined by her eventual admiration for the most powerful patriarch she takes down. At the risk of including a substantial spoiler, I will note that the abusive monster she is hired to eliminate turns out to be a wise and powerful spiritual leader who has—regrettably!—been “forced” to rape children by vaguely developed interdimensional beings that strongly resemble Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. (“Ho ho!” is about the most sinister thing they say.) It’s possible Murakami thought he was injecting solemn complexity into a seemingly black-and-white moral issue, cautioning against rash judgments and vigilante justice. But that’s not the impression I get. I think he was just preoccupied with his plot twist and accidentally took down the moral seriousness of the book in the process. What is the value of invoking horrific injustices if real-world evil suddenly dissolves into an empty narrative stunt? It’s the equivalent of Dostoevsky ending his legendary Grand Inquisitor chapter by having Jesus stage a daring escape on the Millennium Falcon.
UNDERLYING SUPERFICIALITY
That bothers me in no small part because it lends credence to my sneaking suspicion that my attraction to Murakami’s fiction ultimately amounts to a highfalutin guilty pleasure. Yes, he tackles some interesting themes with stylistic daring, but is his writing driven by genuine curiosity in those literary motifs? Or is he dabbling superficially in serious topics that might cast his output in a deceptive aura of prestige? There is much to admire in Murakami that should not be dismissed out of frustration with his shortcomings. I have two more Haruki novels lined up on my TBR, and I don’t expect to banish them like Lear disowning Cordelia. But nagging doubts persist. Does Murakami deserve a place among our literary giants, or is he merely a captivating mountebank?
