Is that a Cicada and a Q and the Greek letter Xi? Could this be a message to the people kind of book?
1Q84: a brilliant and infuriating narrative
https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/1q84-a-brilliant-and-infuriating-narrative-1.430000
Haruki Murakami may be the most commercially successful, critically revered novelist in international literature, an achievement that could easily cause him a creative drought under the glare of expectation. It seems to have had the opposite effect. 1Q84 is his 12th novel and heralded by many as his masterpiece. Book 1 and Book 2 of the three-volume work were published in Japan in 2009 to great acclaim, selling a million copies in a month. Book 3 followed a year later. (The English translation put its readers through a relatively bearable wait of just a week). It is always gratifying when work of idiosyncratic distinction and ambition garners a mainstream audience, as much as it is fascinating to contemplate why that might be.
Murakami employs alternating protagonists in 1Q84, Tengo and Aomame. Tengo is an aspiring writer and maths teacher, Aomame is an exercise instructor and assassin employed by an eccentric dowager to bump-off men who abuse their wives. The dual narrative technique is something Murakami last employed in Hard Boiled Wonderland, and he has the ellipses, elegant concurrences and echoes afforded by parallel stories down to a fine art. For instance, Tengo's father was a TV licence fee-collector, who dragged his son from door to door every Sunday to watch him yelling at people who couldn't pay. Aomame was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, forced to endure similarly woeful hours of unwelcome house-calls. They shared a passing moment of intensity, a briefly held hand, at the age of 10, but haven't seen one another for 20 years. This is also the first time Murakami has written about a successful novelist and it is touching to read his autobiographical meditations on the conflicting worlds of the imagination and literary status. It even allows for some self-referential gags, as when Tengo's editor comments, "The overall plot is a fantasy, but the descriptive detail is incredibly real," at once capturing the novel within the novel and 1Q84 itself.
Most great novelists have several leitmotifs which they shuffle like a deck of cards between every set of covers. Murakami's novels tend to juxtapose the domestic (especially meal preparation) with sinister conspiracies and covert operations; popular culture and classical music; stories within stories; dreaming and wakefulness. He also has a nice line in humanising stock characters: the embattled lovers, the private detective, the jobless outsider, the ambiguous innocent, the mage-like figure who appears roughly two-thirds of the way through the narrative to explain the plot like a Star Trek villain.
The wide-eyed ingénue who communicates in gnomic fragments is portrayed in this case by Fuka-Eri, a 17-year-old schoolgirl whose short story, Air Chrysalis, is entered in a literary competition, spotted by the oleaginous editor, Komatsu, who enlists Tengo to rewrite the piece. It wins the contest and becomes a runaway bestseller. This wouldn't be a problem if it didn't also contain occult information fiercely protected by Sakigake, the cult Fuka-Eri has escaped from.
Both Aomame and Tengo, it transpires, have slipped into an alternative reality, a situation that reveals itself subtly at first, then definitively: the moon is accompanied by a second smaller, green moon; a schismatic section of Sakigake is linked to a violent showdown between police and followers, which explains the new measures of uniform and arms. Aomame reaches this world by taking a shortcut down an emergency escape stairway off a traffic-jammed motorway. Tengo appears to have reached the world of 1Q84 through his rewriting of Air Chrysalis, inadvertently angering Sakigake by giving away the secrets of their sinister "Little People", who may or may not exist. The novel within a novel also features two moons. The title invites comparisons to George Orwell's masterpiece, but parallels aren't easy to draw. On the surface, 1Q84 is a magic-realist love story that shares an alternative reality but in other ways is far removed from Orwell's cold novel of ideas. In 1Q84, the world has modulated, "like the switching of a track" and the changes tend to reflect the characters' inner turmoil; sort of a surrealist pathetic fallacy.
But Orwell's 1984 has been misappropriated in popular culture as shorthand for CCTV cameras and Murakami's paean is naturally more subtle, its echoes more interesting. Murakami's version of Big Brother is the Little People, who we first encounter crawling out of a young girl's mouth as she sleeps. They are two inches tall, but possess the ability to "wind themselves up" to two feet.