1Q84 #1-2 (1Q84, #1-2)

by Haruki Murakami

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.”

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.

Sex with a married woman ten years his senior was stress free and fulfilling, because it couldn’t lead to anything.

A spider had no special skill other than building its web, and no lifestyle choice other than sitting still. It would stay in one place waiting for its prey until, in the natural course of things, it shriveled up and died. This was all genetically predetermined. The spider had no confusion, no despair, no regrets. No metaphysical doubt, no moral complications. Probably. Unlike me.

He wore Armani suits and drove a Jaguar, but finally he was just another ant, working and working until he died without meaning.

Tengo could not quite relax when he was with energetic young college girls. It was like playing with a kitten, fresh and fun at first, but tiring in the end. The girls, too, seemed disappointed to discover that in person, Tengo was not the same as the passionate young math lecturer they encountered in class. He could understand how they felt.

“Finally,” his girlfriend said, “everybody feels safe belonging not to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority.

“I’ve never seen a German shepherd that liked spinach before.” “She doesn’t know she’s a dog.” “What does she think she is?” “Well, she seems to think she’s a special being that transcends classification.”

They’re dainty little creatures that hardly exist at all: they come out of nowhere, search quietly for a few, limited things, and disappear into nothingness again, perhaps to some other world.”

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

She could have been staring at something or looking at nothing at all. She could have been thinking about something or not thinking at all. From a distance, she looked like a realistic sculpture made of some special material.

Tengo wondered if he could possibly reach that age with such a sense of enjoyment. Then he shook his head. No way.

Charles looked less like a prince than a high school physics teacher with stomach trouble.

she felt only revulsion for any kind of religious fundamentalists. The very thought of such people’s intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of their own superiority, and their callous imposition of their own beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage.

Maybe my brain is giving rise to some kind of function that is trying to remake reality, that singles out certain news stories and throws a black cloth over them to keep me from seeing or remembering them

Maybe I can look at it this way – the problem is not with me but with the world around me. It’s not that my consciousness or mind has given rise to some abnormality, but rather that some kind of incomprehensible power has caused the world around me to change.

At some point in time, the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place. Like the switching of a track. In other words, my mind, here and now, belongs to the world that was, but the world itself has already changed into something else.

Either I’m funny or the world’s funny, I don’t know which. The bottle and lid don’t fit. It could be the bottle’s fault or the lid’s fault. In either case, there’s no denying that the fit is bad.

discipline. One aim of my field is to relativize the images possessed by individuals, discover in these images the factors universal to all human beings, and feed these universal truths back to those same individuals. As a result of this process, people might be able to belong to something even as they maintain their autonomy.

of story began to exert a stronger pull on his heart. Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape. As soon as he closed their pages he had to come back to the real world. But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of mathematics. Why should that have been? After much deep thought, he reached a conclusion. No matter how clear the relationships of things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution. That was how it differed from math.

What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?

“You can always find somebody to complain about anything,” Aomame said.

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.”

“But still,” Ayumi said, “it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.” “You may be right,” Aomame said. “But it’s too late to trade it in for another one.”

and he knew that bad premonitions have a far higher accuracy rate than good ones.

The world is moving ahead on its own without my being aware of it, as if we’re playing a game in which everybody else can move only when I have my eyes closed. Then it might not be so strange for there to be two moons hanging in the sky side by side.

The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring – and all of the acts carried out – on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories. All it did was embrace the heavy past with cool, measured detachment.

On the moon there was neither air nor wind. Its vacuum was perfect for preserving memories unscathed.

“What an interesting person you are!” Aomame said, “I’m a very ordinary human being. I just happen to like reading books. Especially history books.”

“I like history books too. They teach us that we’re basically the same, whether now or in the old days. There may be a few differences in clothing and lifestyle, but there’s not that much difference in what we think and do.

Genes don’t think about what constitutes good or evil. They don’t care whether we are happy or unhappy. We’re just a means to an end for them.

He had never been interested in high places. He wondered why not. Maybe it was because he had lived his whole life looking at the ground.

say. But there’s no turning back now, is there?” “Even if we could turn back, we’d probably never end up where we started,”

That is because most people believe not so much in truth as in things they wish were the truth.

What he wanted most of all was uninterrupted free time. If he could have sex on a regular basis, he had nothing more to ask of a woman.

questions. It was probably Chekhov who said that the novelist is not someone who answers questions but someone who asks them.

His eloquence was a kind of intellectual foreplay. Mathematical functions stroked their backs; theorems sent warm breath into their ears.

Fuka-Eri is surely a special being, Tengo realized. She can’t be compared with other girls. She is undoubtedly someone of special significance to me. She is – how should I put it? – an all-encompassing image projected straight at me, but an image I find it impossible to decipher.

“It’s like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn’t move.”

As always, she skillfully drew a week’s worth of desire out of Tengo and took care of it with great efficiency. She experienced full satisfaction, too, like a talented accountant who finds deep pleasure in the complex manipulation of figures in a ledger.

The insane people and the lunatics wandering around London. They wore similar hats and similar beards. How was it possible to distinguish one from the other? With his eyes closed, Tengo could not be sure which world he now belonged to.

“According to Chekhov,” Tamaru said, rising from his chair, “once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.”

guns have to be fired, she told herself in the shower. A pistol is just a tool, and where I’m living is not a storybook world. It’s the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.

Is this actually the real world? she asked herself. If it’s not, then where should I look for reality?

Aomame seemed to have taken part of him with her – part of his heart or body. And in its place, she had left part of her heart or body inside him. This important exchange had taken place in a matter of seconds.

Ayumi was no longer in this world. She was now a cold corpse that was probably being sent for forensic dissection. When that ended, they would sew her back together, probably give her a simple funeral, send her to the crematorium, and burn her. She would turn into smoke, rise up into the sky, and mix with the clouds. Then she would come down to the earth again as rain, and nurture some nameless patch of grass with no story to tell.

Ayumi had a great emptiness inside her, like a desert at the edge of the earth. You could try watering it all you wanted, but everything would be sucked down to the bottom of the world, leaving no trace of moisture. No life could take root there. Not even birds would fly over it.

Tengo’s memory will stay with me, of course. The touch of his hand will stay. My shuddering emotion will stay. The desire to be in his arms will stay. Even if I become a completely different person, my love for Tengo can never be taken from me. That’s the biggest difference between Ayumi and me. At my core, there is not nothing. Neither is it a parched wasteland. At my core, there is love. I’ll go on loving that ten-year-old boy named Tengo forever – his strength, his intelligence, his kindness. He does not exist here, with me, but flesh that does not exist will never die, and promises unmade are never broken.

She turned on the FM radio to find Vivaldi’s Concerto for Woodwinds playing. The piccolo was trilling away like the chirping of a little bird. To Aomame, this sounded like music intended to emphasize the unreality of her present reality.

But who can possibly save all the people of the world? Tengo thought. You could bring all the gods of the world into one place, and still they couldn’t abolish nuclear weapons or eradicate terrorism. They couldn’t end the drought in Africa or bring John Lennon back to life. Far from it – the gods would just break into factions and start fighting among themselves, and the world would probably become even more chaotic than it is now.