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Summary
Summary
"Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves." -- The New York Times Book Review
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The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.
A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 --"Q is for 'question mark.' A world that bears a question." Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.
As Aomame's and Tengo's narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.
A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell's-- 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami's most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.
Author Notes
Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949 in Kyoto, Japan and studied at Tokyo's Waseda University. He opened a coffeehouse/jazz bar in the capital called Peter Cat with his wife. He became a full-time author following the publication of his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, in 1979.
He writes both fiction and non-fiction works. His fiction works include Norwegian Wood, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, The Strange Library, and Men Without Women. Several of his stories have been adapted for the stage and as films. His nonfiction works include What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. He has received numerous literary awards including the Franz Kafka Prize for Kafka on the Shore, the Yomiuri Prize for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and the Jerusalem Prize. He has translated into Japanese literature written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, and Paul Theroux.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The massive new novel from international sensation Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running) sold out in his native Japan, where it was released in three volumes, and is bound to provoke a similar reaction in America, where rabid fans are unlikely to be deterred by its near thousand-page bulk. Nor should they be; Murakami's trademark plainspoken oddness is on full display in this story of lapsed childhood friends Aomame and Tengo, now lonely adults in 1984 Tokyo, whose destinies may be curiously intertwined. Aomame is a beautiful assassin working exclusively for a wealthy dowager who targets abusive men. Meanwhile Tengo, an unpublished writer and mathematics instructor at a cram school, accepts an offer to write a novel called Air Chrysalis based on a competition entry written by an enigmatic 17-year-old named Fuka-Eri. Fuka-Eri proves to be dangerously connected to the infamous Sakigake cult, whose agents are engaged in a bloody game of cat-and-mouse with Aomame. Even stranger is that two moons have appeared over Tokyo, the dawning of a parallel time line known as 1Q84 controlled by the all-powerful Little People. The condensing of three volumes into a single tome makes for some careless repetition, and casual readers may feel that what actually occurs doesn't warrant such length. But Murakami's fans know that his focus has always been on the quiet strangeness of life, the hidden connections between perfect strangers, and the power of the non sequitur to reveal the associative strands that weave our modern world. 1Q84 goes further than any Murakami novel so far, and perhaps further than any novel before it, toward exposing the delicacy of the membranes that separate love from chance encounters, the kind from the wicked, and reality from what people living in the pent-up modern world dream about when they go to sleep under an alien moon. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Murakami writes two kinds of novels: short, intimate, crystalline portraits of lovers, often trapped in alternate worlds or struggling between secret selves (After Dark, 2007), and much longer, broad-canvas epics (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1997) that submerge the reader in a tidal wave of story. His latest definitely falls into the latter camp, and, yet, it clings resolutely to the intimacy of the shorter works. This foray into what is unquestionably Murakami's most vividly imagined parallel world begins simply, with two seemingly ordinary events: two lonely 10-year-olds, a boy and a girl, Tengo and Aomame, hold hands in an empty classroom, and for the next 20 years, while never seeing one another, they dream of meeting but are strangely paralyzed to make it happen. Then Aomame, a 30-year-old woman in 1984 and an assassin who kills men who abuse women walks down an emergency exit from a Tokyo expressway and finds herself in another world, which she calls 1Q84, a world overseen by two moons and ruled, apparently, by the quixotic little people. Meanwhile, Tengo has rewritten a novel by an enigmatic 17-year-old girl that accurately describes the world of 1Q84. As the lives of Tengo, Aomame, and a Dostoyevskian private investigator, who works for a religious cult that worships the little people, swirl closer and closer together, Murakami draws the reader deeper and deeper into this utterly baffling universe, switching narration between the three principal characters, each of whom grasps only a small part of their two-mooned world. Gradually but inexorably, the tension builds, as we root passionately for Tengo and Aomame to find one another and hold hands again, so simple a human connection offering a kind of oasis in the midst of the unexplainable and the terrifying. When Murakami melds fantasy and realism, mystery and epic, it is no simple genre-bending exercise; rather, it is literary alchemy of the highest order. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Murakami, whose work has been translated into 40 languages, is one of our most-honored international fiction writers. His latest will attract great interest in literary circles.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT runs deep in life, the feeling that we have wandered down some corridor just alongside the one where we truly belong. An inattentive step or two and already we have traveled too far. The door has disappeared. Our place in the world has become irrecoverable. The past half-decade of American letters has seen the translation or publication of a little pack of kindred novels intended to reproduce this sensation, nearly all of them fascinating. Call it the literature of the ontological wrong turn. Some of its representatives have been issued to great gales of attention, like "1Q84," by Haruki Murakami, or "Remainder," by Tom McCarthy, others to the keen enthusiasm of a few lucky explorers, like "Metropole," by Ferenc Karinthy, or (by my lights the secret masterpiece of the field) "The Other City," by Michal Ajvaz. To that beguiling list add J. Robert Lennon's allusive and mysterious new novel, "Familiar," his ninth book and one of his finest. "All of this is impossible, we're doing impossible things," Lennon writes. "People do impossible things, all day long." For Elisa Macalaster Brown, returning to New York after a visit to Wisconsin, the world reveals its impossibility on a dull stretch of Interstate 90 when the crack in her windshield, by which she likes to align her car with the roadside, instantaneously vanishes. All at once she is carrying a different phone, wearing different clothes. The clouds have multiplied in the sky. She is still herself, or some version of herself, but what that means is no longer certain. Only gradually does her life disclose the full range of its differences to her. Some of those differences are mundane or amusing: the moment the change takes place, her mouth fills with the taste of mint from the gum she is suddenly chewing, and while she used to find politics meaningless, now she is known for her Sarah Palin obsession. Some pose a predicament: she has a job whose responsibilities she is not sure how to fulfill, a therapist she has never met and a best friend to whom she has never spoken. And some wrench her so far outside the history she recollects that she can barely accommodate herself to them: her son Silas, who died in a car accident, is alive, while her other son, Sam, has become alienated from her; the lover she once took now greets her as a stranger; and her marriage has become sweet, loving, "cheerful, cheerful, cheerful," rather than the "habitual, practical, inert" exercise it used to be. "To pick up the phone and find that love is gone, that's something a person can understand," she reflects. "To pick up the phone and find that love is here, where it doesn't belong: well." What happened? she wonders, and so do we, and while the novel produces a whole flock of theories, not one of them colors its pages for longer than a moment before it darts out of sight. Has fate offered Elisa the chance to shoulder her life onto a new path? Is she meant to correct the decisions she remembers making or to affirm them? Has she entered an actual parallel reality, or is the life she recalls entirely false, the result of an "imagination broken by guilt and grief"? Has her new life been her real one all along? Where does the glitch finally lie: in her mind or in the universe? Is there another Elisa, with whom she has traded places, and if so what has become of her? Or is Elisa herself merely a copy, duplicated and dislocated from the original, that lonely wife and grieving mother still out there enduring her days somewhere? Is there a reason for her transformation, an intelligence behind it? Can she ever find her way back home? Life is like a long fall from a tremendous height; or no - like a condemned house collapsing abruptly into the earth; or no - like a cell undergoing mitosis, "straining to separate . . . pushing at the edges of its tiny world"; or no - like an ornate video game ("INSTRUCTIONS: FIND YOURSELF"), the maneuvers it permits abundant but not limitless; or no - like the static on a TV screen, "a mesmerizing and random and utterly boring thing," Elisa thinks, "that nevertheless compelled and frightened her." The book doesn't forbid any of these possibilities, but it doesn't insist upon any of them, either. Instead, it offers readers a swerving existential mystery of the sort that Dennis Potter used to champion: all clues, no solutions. (Lennon's recent collection "Pieces for the Left Hand," with its hundred alluringly peculiar little stories, is all clues, too, but with one important difference: Each story is a clue by itself, sequestered from every other, and each seems to answer some tiny unspoken mystery of its own.) Elisa might feel that her experience has passed beyond her understanding, but even the most conventional life occasionally presents the same feeling. Turn your head a bare inch to the left and you'll catch a glimpse of something you can't explain, something strange shimmering beneath the dirt and asphalt of the ordinary. The book reflects this sensation down to its very title, "Familiar," a word that indicates the normal, of course, the commonplace, but also the supernatural, the witchy. Late in the narrative, when Elisa "starts painting diptychs: nearly identical panels, save for slight differences," the moment seems to volunteer an insight. I paused when it occurred to me that the novel had been displaying this same property all along, that it was a kind of diptych encouraging us to take its incidents and adopt two different perspectives toward them simultaneously, asking us to see, right alongside each other, the story of a woman who journeys between realities and a woman who takes leave of her senses, a woman who loses a child to death and a woman who loses both children to estrangement, without allowing either perception to blur. Lennon's sentences are often diptychs, as well, exhibiting some image or incident twice, with only a small modification of effect. "To Elisa this seems disruptive, drastic: isn't there a kind of hush in the room just now, a suspension of movement and sound?" "The therapist is not looking at Derek, but at her, gazing at her with a strange intensity, as though for the first time, as though she's naked." "She realized that she had moved on, that her life had been restored to her. And then the thing that happened happened." All of which is to say that this novel, like every other, is a novel of patterns. What makes it greater than that is the insight it displays - sometimes moving, sometimes horrific - into the mind of a woman who requires the machinery of science fiction in order to realize she has failed her children and her life is incommunicable, who does not begin to see herself clearly until the entire universe has altered itself to repair her windshield, who wonders if maybe, after all, the world isn't better with a crack in it. Has Lennon's heroine entered an actual parallel reality, or has her new life been her real one all along? Kevin Brockmeier's most recent novel, "The Illumination," is now available in paperback.
Guardian Review
Nearly all of Murakami's novels play with the device of a parallel dimension into which characters can slip through cracks or portals. Alternate worlds, in previous Murakami works, have usually been places where a man is looking for a woman he has lost. The same is true here, except that the search is mutual, and 1Q84 - an epic romance in three "books" and two volumes - worries more disconcertingly at the possibility of becoming "irretrievably lost", a phrase that appears several times, growing ever creepier. Most characters in "literary fiction" take for granted a certain unexamined metaphysics and worry exclusively about the higher-level complexities of circumstance and relationships. Throughout Murakami's oeuvre, on the other hand, his characters never cease to express their bafflement. It is natural that his work should enchant younger readers, to whom the problems of being are still fresh, that his books should seem an outstretched hand of sympathy to anyone who feels that they too have been tossed, without their permission, into a labyrinth. - Steven Poole Nearly all of Murakami's novels play with the device of a parallel dimension into which characters can slip through cracks or portals. Alternate worlds, in previous Murakami works, have usually been places where a man is looking for a woman he has lost. - Steven Poole.
Kirkus Review
After Dark, 2008, etc.) ambitious, sprawling and thoroughly stunning new novel had a tagline, that would be it. Things are not what they seem, indeed. A cab driver tells a protagonist named Aomame--her name means "green beans"--as much, instructing her on doing something that she has never done before and would perhaps never dream of doing, even if she had known the particulars of how to do it: namely, to descend from an endless traffic jam on an elevated expressway by means of a partially hidden service staircase. Aomame is game: She's tough, with strong legs, and she doesn't mind if the assembled motorists of Tokyo catch a glimpse of what's under her skirt as she drops into the rabbit hole. Meanwhile, there's the case of Tengo, a math teacher who, like Aomame, is 30 years old in 1984; dulled even as Japan thrives in its go-go years, he would seem to have almost no ambition, glad to serve as the ghostwriter for a teenage girl's torrid novel that will soon become a bestseller--and just as soon disappear. The alternate-universe Tokyo in which Aomame reappears (her first tipoff that it's not the "real" Tokyo the fact that the cops are carrying different guns and wearing slightly different uniforms), which she comes to call 1Q84, the q for question mark, proves fertile ground for all manner of crimes, major and minor, in which she involves herself. Can she ever click her heels and get back home? Perhaps not, for, as she grimly concludes at one point in her quest, "The door to this world only opened in one direction." It's only a matter of time before Aomame's story becomes entangled in Tengo's--in this strange universe, everyone sleeps with everyone--and she becomes the object of his own hero quest; as he says, "Before the world's rules loosen up too muchand all logic is lost, I have to find Aomame." Will he? Stay tuned. Orwellian dystopia, sci-fi, the modern world (terrorism, drugs, apathy, pop novels)--all blend in this dreamlike, strange and wholly unforgettable epic.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In 1982 Tokyo, Aomame leaves a cab to avoid gridlock and finds herself in a brave new world, while Tengo labors to polish a manuscript a teenager has submitted to a literary contest. These two stories wind around each other and eventually conjoin in Murakami's shining magnum opus, which tells us everything we need to know about the world today. (LJ 9/15/11) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Aomame DON'T LET APPEARANCES FOOL YOU The taxi's radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janaìcek's Sinfonietta --probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn't seem to be listening very closely, either. With his mouth clamped shut, he stared straight ahead at the endless line of cars stretching out on the elevated expressway, like a veteran fisherman standing in the bow of his boat, reading the ominous confluence of two currents. Aomame settled into the broad back seat, closed her eyes, and listened to the music. How many people could recognize Janaìcek's Sinfonietta after hearing just the first few bars? Probably somewhere between "very few" and "almost none." But for some reason, Aomame was one of the few who could. Janaìcek composed his little symphony in 1926. He originally wrote the opening as a fanfare for a gymnastics festival. Aomame imagined 1926 Czechoslovakia: The First World War had ended, and the country was freed from the long rule of the Hapsburg Dynasty. As they enjoyed the peaceful respite visiting central Europe, people drank Pilsner beer in cafeìs and manufactured handsome light machine guns. Two years earlier, in utter obscurity, Franz Kafka had left the world behind. Soon Hitler would come out of nowhere and gobble up this beautiful little country in the blink of an eye, but at the time no one knew what hardships lay in store for them. This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: "At the time, no one knew what was coming." Listening to Janaìcek's music, Aomame imagined the carefree winds sweeping across the plains of Bohemia and thought about the vicissitudes of history. In 1926 Japan's Taisho Emperor died, and the era name was changed to Showa. It was the beginning of a terrible, dark time in this country, too. The short interlude of modernism and democracy was ending, giving way to fascism. Aomame loved history as much as she loved sports. She rarely read fiction, but history books could keep her occupied for hours. What she liked about history was the way all its facts were linked with particular dates and places. She did not find it especially difficult to remember historical dates. Even if she did not learn them by rote memorization, once she grasped the relationship of an event to its time and to the events preceding and following it, the date would come to her automatically. In both middle school and high school, she had always gotten the top grade on history exams. It puzzled her to hear someone say he had trouble learning dates. How could something so simple be a problem for anyone? "Aomame" was her real name. Her grandfather on her father's side came from some little mountain town or village in Fukushima Prefecture, where there were supposedly a number of people who bore the name, written with exactly the same characters as the word for "green peas" and pronounced with the same four syllables, "Ah-oh-mah-meh." She had never been to the place, however. Her father had cut his ties with his family before her birth, just as her mother had done with her own family, so she had never met any of her grandparents. She didn't travel much, but on those rare occasions when she stayed in an unfamiliar city or town, she would always open the hotel's phone book to see if there were any Aomames in the area. She had never found a single one, and whenever she tried and failed, she felt like a lonely castaway on the open sea. Telling people her name was always a bother. As soon as the name left her lips, the other person looked puzzled or confused. "Miss Aomame?" "Yes. Just like 'green peas.' " Employers required her to have business cards printed, which only made things worse. People would stare at the card as if she had thrust a letter at them bearing bad news. When she announced her name on the telephone, she would often hear suppressed laughter. In waiting rooms at the doctor's or at public offices, people would look up at the sound of her name, curious to see what someone called "Green Peas" could look like. Some people would get the name of the plant wrong and call her "Edamame" or "Soramame," whereupon she would gently correct them: "No, I'm not soybeans or fava beans, just green peas. Pretty close, though. Aomame." How many times in her thirty years had she heard the same remarks, the same feeble jokes about her name? My life might have been totally different if I hadn't been born with this name. If I had had an ordinary name like Sato or Tanaka or Suzuki, I could have lived a slightly more relaxed life or looked at people with somewhat more forgiving eyes. Perhaps. Eyes closed, Aomame listened to the music, allowing the lovely unison of the brasses to sink into her brain. Just then it occurred to her that the sound quality was too good for a radio in a taxicab. Despite the rather low volume at which it was playing, the sound had true depth, and the overtones were clearly audible. She opened her eyes and leaned forward to study the dashboard stereo. The jet-black device shone with a proud gloss. She couldn't make out its brand name, but it was obviously high end, with lots of knobs and switches, the green numerals of the station readout clear against the black panel. This was not the kind of stereo you expected to see in an ordinary fleet cab. She looked around at the cab's interior. She had been too absorbed in her own thoughts to notice until now, but this was no ordinary taxi. The high quality of the trim was evident, and the seat was especially comfortable. Above all, it was quiet. The car probably had extra sound insulation to keep noise out, like a soundproofed music studio. The driver probably owned his own cab. Many such owner-drivers would spare no expense on the upkeep of their automobiles. Moving only her eyes, Aomame searched for the driver's registration card, without success. This did not seem to be an illegal unlicensed cab, though. It had a standard taxi meter, which was ticking off the proper fare: 2,150 yen so far. Still, the registration card showing the driver's name was nowhere to be found. "What a nice car," Aomame said, speaking to the driver's back. "So quiet. What kind is it?" "Toyota Crown Royal Saloon," the driver replied succinctly. "The music sounds great in here." "It's a very quiet car. That's one reason I chose it. Toyota has some of the best sound-insulating technology in the world." Aomame nodded and leaned back in her seat. There was something about the driver's way of speaking that bothered her, as though he were leaving something important unsaid. For example (and this is just one example), his remark on Toyota's impeccable sound insulation might be taken to mean that some other Toyota feature was less than impeccable. And each time he finished a sentence, there was a tiny but meaningful lump of silence left behind. This lump floated there, enclosed in the car's restricted space like an imaginary miniature cloud, giving Aomame a strangely unsettled feeling. "It certainly is a quiet car," Aomame declared, as if to sweep the little cloud away. "And the stereo looks especially fine." "Decisiveness was key when I bought it," the driver said, like a retired staff officer explaining a past military success. "I have to spend so much time in here, I want the best sound available. And--" Aomame waited for what was to follow, but nothing followed. She closed her eyes again and concentrated on the music. She knew nothing about Janaìcek as a person, but she was quite sure that he never imagined that in 1984 someone would be listening to his composition in a hushed Toyota Crown Royal Saloon on the gridlocked elevated Metropolitan Expressway in Tokyo. Why, though, Aomame wondered, had she instantly recognized the piece to be Janaìcek's Sinfonietta ? And how did she know it had been composed in 1926? She was not a classical music fan, and she had no personal recollections involving Janaìcek, yet the moment she heard the opening bars, all her knowledge of the piece came to her by reflex, like a flock of birds swooping through an open window. The music gave her an odd, wrenching kind of feeling. There was no pain or unpleasantness involved, just a sensation that all the elements of her body were being physically wrung out. Aomame had no idea what was going on. Could Sinfonietta actually be giving me this weird feeling? "Janaìcek," Aomame said half-consciously, though after the word emerged from her lips, she wanted to take it back. "What's that, ma'am?" "Janaìcek. The man who wrote this music." "Never heard of him." "Czech composer." "Well-well," the driver said, seemingly impressed. "Do you own this cab?" Aomame asked, hoping to change the subject. "I do," the driver answered. After a brief pause, he added, "It's all mine. My second one." "Very comfortable seats." "Thank you, ma'am." Turning his head slightly in her direction, he asked, "By the way, are you in a hurry?" "I have to meet someone in Shibuya. That's why I asked you to take the expressway." "What time is your meeting?" "Four thirty," Aomame said. "Well, it's already three forty-five. You'll never make it." "Is the backup that bad?" "Looks like a major accident up ahead. This is no ordinary traffic jam. We've hardly moved for quite a while." She wondered why the driver was not listening to traffic reports. The expressway had been brought to a standstill. He should be listening to updates on the taxi drivers' special radio station. "You can tell it's an accident without hearing a traffic report?" Aomame asked. "You can't trust them," he said with a hollow ring to his voice. "They're half lies. The Expressway Corporation only releases reports that suit its agenda. If you really want to know what's happening here and now, you've got to use your own eyes and your own judgment." "And your judgment tells you that we'll be stuck here?" "For quite a while," the driver said with a nod. "I can guarantee you that. When it backs up solid like this, the expressway is sheer hell. Is your meeting an important one?" Aomame gave it some thought. "Yes, very. I have to see a client." "That's a shame. You're probably not going to make it." The driver shook his head a few times as if trying to ease a stiff neck. The wrinkles on the back of his neck moved like some kind of ancient creature. Half-consciously watching the movement, Aomame found herself thinking of the sharp object in the bottom of her shoulder bag. A touch of sweat came to her palms. "What do you think I should do?" she asked. "There's nothing you can do up here on the expressway--not until we get to the next exit. If we were down on the city streets, you could just step out of the cab and take the subway." "What is the next exit?" "Ikejiri. We might not get there before the sun goes down, though." Before the sun goes down? Aomame imagined herself locked in this cab until sunset. The Janaìcek was still playing. Muted strings came to the foreground as if to soothe her heightened anxiety. That earlier wrenching sensation had largely subsided. What could that have been? Aomame had caught the cab near Kinuta and told the driver to take the elevated expressway from Yohga. The flow of traffic had been smooth at first, but suddenly backed up just before Sangenjaya, after which they had hardly moved. The outbound lanes were moving fine. Only the side headed toward downtown Tokyo was tragically jammed. Inbound Expressway Number 3 would not normally back up at three in the afternoon, which was why Aomame had directed the driver to take it. "Time charges don't add up on the expressway," the driver said, speaking toward his rearview mirror. "So don't let the fare worry you. I suppose you need to get to your meeting, though?" "Yes, of course. But there's nothing I can do about it, is there?" He glanced at her in the mirror. He was wearing pale sunglasses. The way the light was shining in, Aomame could not make out his expression. "Well, in fact, there might be a way. You could take the subway to Shibuya from here, but you'd have to do something a little . . . extreme." "Something extreme?" "It's not something I can openly advise you to do." Aomame said nothing. She waited for more with narrowed eyes. "Look over there. See that turnout just ahead?" he asked, pointing. "See? Near that Esso sign." Aomame strained to see through the windshield until she focused on a space to the left of the two-lane roadway where broken-down cars could pull off. The elevated roadway had no shoulder but instead had emergency turnouts at regular intervals. Aomame saw that the turnout was outfitted with a yellow emergency phone box for contacting the Metropolitan Expressway Public Corporation office. The turnout itself was empty at the moment. On top of a building beyond the oncoming lanes there was a big billboard advertising Esso gasoline with a smiling tiger holding a gas hose. "To tell you the truth, there's a stairway leading from the turnout down to street level. It's for drivers who have to abandon their cars in a fire or earthquake and climb down to the street. Usually only maintenance workers use it. If you were to climb down that stairway, you'd be near a Tokyu Line station. From there, it's nothing to Shibuya." "I had no idea these Metropolitan Expressways had emergency stairs," Aomame said. "Not many people do." "But wouldn't I get in trouble using it without permission when there's no real emergency?" The driver paused a moment. Then he said, "I wonder. I don't know all the rules of the Corporation, but you wouldn't be hurting anybody. They'd probably look the other way, don't you think? Anyway, they don't have people watching every exit. The Metropolitan Expressway Public Corporation is famous for having a huge staff but nobody really doing any work." "What kind of stairway is it?" "Hmm, kind of like a fire escape. You know, like the ones you see on the backs of old buildings. It's not especially dangerous or anything. It's maybe three stories high, and you just climb down. There's a barrier at the opening, but it's not very high. Anybody who wanted to could get over it easily." "Have you ever used one of these stairways?" Instead of replying, the driver directed a faint smile toward his rearview mirror, a smile that could be read any number of ways. "It's strictly up to you," he said, tapping lightly on the steering wheel in time to the music. "If you just want to sit here and relax and enjoy the music, I'm fine with that. We might as well resign ourselves to the fact that we're not going anywhere soon. All I'm saying is that there are emergency measures you can take if you have urgent business." Aomame frowned and glanced at her watch. She looked up and studied the surrounding cars. On the right was a black Mitsubishi Pajero wagon with a thin layer of white dust. A bored-looking young man in the front passenger seat was smoking a cigarette with his window open. He had long hair, a tanned face, and wore a dark red windbreaker. The car's luggage compartment was filled with a number of worn surfboards. In front of him was a gray Saab 900, its dark-tinted windows closed tight, preventing any glimpse of who might be inside. The body was so immaculately polished, you could probably see your face in it. The car ahead was a red Suzuki Alto with a Nerima Ward license plate and a dented bumper. A young mother sat gripping the wheel. Her small child was standing on the seat next to her, moving back and forth to dispel its boredom. The mother's annoyance showed on her face as she cautioned the child to keep still. Aomame could see her mouth moving. The scene was unchanged from ten minutes earlier. In those ten minutes, the car had probably advanced less than ten yards. Aomame thought hard, arranging everything in order of priority. She needed hardly any time to reach a conclusion. As if to coincide with this, the final movement of the Janaìcek was just beginning. She pulled her small Ray-Ban sunglasses partway out of her shoulder bag and took three thousand-yen bills from her wallet. Handing the bills to the driver, she said, "I'll get out here. I really can't be late for this appointment." The driver nodded and took the money. "Would you like a receipt?" "No need. And keep the change." "Thanks very much," he said. "Be careful, it looks windy out there. Don't slip." "I'll be careful," Aomame said. "And also," the driver said, facing the mirror, "please remember: things are not what they seem." Things are not what they seem, Aomame repeated mentally. "What do you mean by that?" she asked with knitted brows. The driver chose his words carefully: "It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary . Am I right? People do not ordinarily climb down the emergency stairs of the Metropolitan Expressway in the middle of the day--especially women." "I suppose you're right." "Right. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality." Aomame thought about what he was saying, and in the course of her thinking, the Janaìcek ended and the audience broke into immediate applause. This was obviously a live recording. The applause was long and enthusiastic. There were even occasional calls of "Bravo!" She imagined the smiling conductor bowing repeatedly to the standing audience. He would then raise his head, raise his arms, shake hands with the concertmaster, turn away from the audience, raise his arms again in praise of the orchestra, face front, and take another deep bow. As she listened to the long recorded applause, it sounded less like applause and more like an endless Martian sandstorm. "There is always, as I said, only one reality," the driver repeated slowly, as if underlining an important passage in a book. "Of course," Aomame said. He was right. A physical object could only be in one place at one time. Einstein proved that. Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely. Aomame pointed toward the car stereo. "Great sound." The driver nodded. "What was the name of that composer again?" "Janaìcek." "Janaìcek," the driver repeated, as if committing an important password to memory. Then he pulled the lever that opened the passenger door. "Be careful," he said. "I hope you get to your appointment on time." Aomame stepped out of the cab, gripping the strap of her large leather shoulder bag. The applause was still going. She started walking carefully along the left edge of the elevated road toward the emergency turnout some ten meters ahead. Each time a large truck roared by on the opposite side, she felt the surface of the road shake--or, rather, undulate--through her high heels, as if she were walking on the deck of an aircraft carrier on a stormy sea. The little girl in the front seat of the red Suzuki Alto stuck her head out of her window and stared, open-mouthed, at Aomame passing by. Then she turned to her mother and asked, "Mommy, what is that lady doing? Where's she going? I want to get out and walk too. Please, Mommy! Pleeease!" The mother responded to her cries in silence, shaking her head and shooting an accusatory glance at Aomame. The girl's loud pleading and the mother's glance were the only responses to her that Aomame noticed. The other drivers just sat at the wheel smoking and watching her make her way with determined steps between the cars and the side wall. They knit their brows and squinted as if looking at a too-bright object but seemed to have temporarily suspended all judgment. For someone to be walking on the Metropolitan Expressway was by no means an everyday event, with or without the usual flow of traffic, so it took them some time to process the sight as an actual occurrence--all the more so because the walker was a young woman in high heels and a miniskirt. Aomame pulled in her chin, kept her gaze fixed straight ahead, her back straight, and her pace steady. Her chestnut-colored Charles Jourdan heels clicked against the road's surface, and the skirts of her coat waved in the breeze. April had begun, but there was still a chill in the air and a hint of roughness to come. Aomame wore a beige spring coat over her green light wool Junko Shimada suit. A black leather bag hung over her shoulder, and her shoulder-length hair was impeccably trimmed and shaped. She wore no accessories of any kind. Five foot six inches tall, she carried not an ounce of excess fat. Every muscle in her body was well toned, but her coat kept that fact hidden. A detailed examination of her face from the front would reveal that the size and shape of her ears were significantly different, the left one much bigger and malformed. No one ever noticed this, however, because her hair nearly always covered her ears. Her lips formed a tight straight line, suggesting that she was not easily approachable. Also contributing to this impression were her small, narrow nose, somewhat protruding cheekbones, broad forehead, and long, straight eyebrows. All of these were arranged to sit in a pleasing oval shape, however, and while tastes differ, few would object to calling her a beautiful woman. The one problem with her face was its extreme paucity of expression. Her firmly closed lips only formed a smile when absolutely necessary. Her eyes had the cool, vigilant stare of a superior deck officer. Thanks to these features, no one ever had a vivid impression of her face. She attracted attention not so much because of the qualities of her features but rather because of the naturalness and grace with which her expression moved. In that sense, Aomame resembled an insect skilled at biological mimicry. What she most wanted was to blend in with her background by changing color and shape, to remain inconspicuous and not easily remembered. This was how she had protected herself since childhood. Whenever something caused her to frown or grimace, however, her features underwent dramatic changes. The muscles of her face tightened, pulling in several directions at once and emphasizing the lack of symmetry in the overall structure. Deep wrinkles formed in her skin, her eyes suddenly drew inward, her nose and mouth became violently distorted, her jaw twisted to the side, and her lips curled back, exposing Aomame's large white teeth. Instantly, she became a wholly different person, as if a cord had broken, dropping the mask that normally covered her face. The shocking transformation terrified anyone who saw it, so she was careful never to frown in the presence of a stranger. She would contort her face only when she was alone or when she was threatening a man who displeased her. Reaching the turnout, Aomame stopped and looked around. It took only a moment for her to find the emergency stairway. As the driver had said, there was a metal barrier across the entrance. It was a little more than waist high, and it was locked. Stepping over it in a tight miniskirt could be a slight problem, but only if she cared about being seen. Without hesitating, she slipped her high heels off and shoved them into her shoulder bag. She would probably ruin her stockings by walking in bare feet, but she could easily buy another pair. People stared at her in silence as she removed her shoes and coat. From the open window of the black Toyota Celica parked next to the turnout, Michael Jackson's high-pitched voice provided her with background music. "Billie Jean" was playing. She felt as if she were performing a striptease. So what? Let them look all they want. They must be bored waiting for the traffic jam to end. Sorry, though, folks, this is all I'll be taking off today. Aomame slung the bag across her chest to keep it from falling. Some distance away she could see the brand-new black Toyota Crown Royal Saloon in which she had been riding, its windshield reflecting the blinding glare of the afternoon sun. She could not make out the face of the driver, but she knew he must be watching. Don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality. Aomame took in a long, deep breath, and slowly let it out. Then, to the tune of "Billie Jean," she swung her leg over the metal barrier. Her miniskirt rode up to her hips. Who gives a damn? Let them look all they want. Seeing what's under my skirt doesn't let them really see me as a person. Besides, her legs were the part of her body of which Aomame was the most proud. Stepping down once she was on the other side of the barrier, Aomame straightened her skirt, brushed the dust from her hands, put her coat back on, slung her bag across her chest again, and pushed her sunglasses more snugly against her face. The emergency stairway lay before her--a metal stairway painted gray. Plain, practical, functional. Not made for use by miniskirted women wearing only stockings on their otherwise bare feet. Nor had Junko Shimada designed Aomame's suit for use on the emergency escape stairs of Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway Number 3. Another huge truck roared down the outbound side of the expressway, shaking the stairs. The breeze whistled through gaps in the stairway's metal framework. But in any case, there it was, before her: the stairway. All that was left for her to do was climb down to the street. Aomame turned for one last look at the double line of cars packed on the expressway, scanning them from left to right, then right to left, like a speaker on a podium looking for questions from the audience now that she had finished her talk. There had been no movement at all. Trapped on the expressway with nothing else to occupy them, people were watching her every move, wondering what this woman on the far side of the barrier would do next. Aomame lightly pulled in her chin, bit her lower lip, and took stock of her audience through the dark green lenses of her sunglasses. You couldn't begin to imagine who I am, where I'm going, or what I'm about to do, Aomame said to her audience without moving her lips. All of you are trapped here. You can't go anywhere, forward or back. But I'm not like you. I have work to do. I have a mission to accomplish. And so, with your permission, I shall move ahead. Aomame had the urge at the end to treat her assembled throng to one of her special scowls, but she managed to stop herself. There was no time for such things now. Once she let herself frown, it took both time and effort to regain her original expression. Aomame turned her back on her silent audience and, with careful steps, began to descend the emergency stairway, feeling the chill of the crude metal rungs against the soles of her feet. Also chilling was the early April breeze, which swept her hair back now and then, revealing her misshapen left ear. Excerpted from 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
