![]() ![]() Not everyone wants to be in such a dislocated locale, and the novels are often about heroic efforts to get out of Wonderland, but it is a primary destination site, like Las Vegas. They believe in the apocalypse and Armageddon, or they go down various rabbit holes and arrive in what Murakami himself, in a bow to Lewis Carroll, calls Wonderland. The resulting narratives conform to what I have called Unrealism. Murakami’s novels, stories, and nonfiction refuse to make such distinctions, or, rather, they display, often very bravely and beautifully, the pull of the unreal and the fantastical on ordinary citizens who, unable to bear the world they have been given, desperately wish to go somewhere else. Much of the time, we can talk about fiction without having to take a stand on what is real and what isn’t, although we do sometimes say that this or that event or character is “implausible” or “fantastical,” thereby rescuing truth-value for the plausible and the everyday. After all, if we cannot agree about what reality is, then why should we agree about what realism is, either? The entire topic dissolves quickly because its scope becomes too large and its outlines too indefinable to be particularly useful. The word “realism” is a key descriptive term that readers often apply to certain works of literature without any general agreement about what it actually means. This idea, which used to be the province of science fiction and French critical theory, is now in the mainstream, and it has created a new mode of fiction-Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City is another recent example-that I would call “Unrealism.” Unrealism reflects an entire generation’s conviction that the world they have inherited is a crummy second-rate duplicate. “ At some point in time,” a character muses, “the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place.“ ![]() The world we had is gone, and all we have now is a simulacrum, a fake, of the world we once had. At one point, a character argues against the existence of a parallel world, but the two main characters in 1Q84 (Q=”a world that bears a question”) are absolutely convinced that they live not in a parallel world but in a replica one, where they do not want to be. 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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