Even the book’s design emphasizes that mirroring: as you turn the pages, the page numbers climb or drop in succession along the margins, with the sequential numerals on one side in normal display type but mirror-reversed on the facing page. In this book, Murakami, who is nothing if not ambitious, has created a kind of alternative world, a mirror of ours, reversed. I don’t know if words like “originality” or “inevitability” fit here, and I suppose I might agree if someone insisted it’s not at that level, but finally, after you work your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leaves a real impression-it gets to you in some strange, inexplicable way that may be a little disturbing.Īfter arriving at page 925 of 1Q84, the reader is likely to see an analogue. The balance between the two is excellent. The overall plot is a fantasy, but the descriptive detail is incredibly real. But the story itself has real power: it draws you in.
You could pick it apart completely if you wanted to. Haruki Murakami, Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 2005Įarly in Haruki Murakami’s new novel, a character describes to an editor at a Japanese publishing house a manuscript of a novel that has come to his attention, and what he says sounds like a preview of the book we are about to read:
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