1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3)

by Haruki Murakami

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: “At the time, no one knew what was coming.”

“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.”

Komatsu believed that mental acuity was never born from comfortable circumstances.

Rumor had it that when Komatsu was a student in the prestigious University of Tokyo’s Department of Literature in 1960, he had been one of the leaders of the huge leftist demonstrations against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.

“You can have tons of talent, but it won’t necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, though, you’ll never go hungry.”

The late sixties’ bombastic calls for “revolution” were already a thing of the past, and everyone assumed that the remnants of the radicals had been wiped out in the police siege of the Asama Mountain Lodge in 1972.

A newly changed world must need one, too. 1Q84—that’s what I’ll call this new world, Aomame decided. Q is for “question mark.” A world that bears a question.

She just didn’t like young men. They were so aggressive and self-confident, but they had nothing to talk about, and whatever they had to say was boring. In bed, they went at it like animals and had no clue about the true enjoyment of sex. She liked those slightly tired middle-aged men, preferably in the early stages of baldness. They should be clean and free of any hint of vulgarity.

‘Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.’

When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.”

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. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. Depending on the nature and direction of the problem, a solution could be suggested in the narrative.

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?

“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.”

“The Tale of the Heike.” Tengo was astounded. To think that a thirteenth-century samurai war chronicle should be her favorite “novel”!

“Even if we could turn back, we’d probably never end up where we started,” the Professor said.

And the body is not the only target of rape. Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood.

At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past.

Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us—is rewritten—we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”

The characteristics of the package determine the nature of the contents, not the other way around.”

That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

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

A person’s last moments are an important thing. You can’t choose how you’re born, but you can choose how you die.”

The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you.

For a ten-year-old boy and girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world.

Tengo went on, “I’m tired of living in hatred and resentment. I’m tired of living unable to love anyone. I don’t have a single friend—not one. And, worst of all, I can’t even love myself. Why is that? Why can’t I love myself? It’s because I can’t love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.

If you couldn’t understand something without an explanation, you couldn’t understand it with an explanation.

“Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.”

Have you read Frazer’s The Golden Bough?”

“There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person’s heart,” Leader repeated softly.

The scene outside the window suggested that the world had settled in a place somewhere midway between “being miserable” and “lacking in joy,” and consisted of an infinite agglomeration of variously shaped microcosms.

The man’s shoulders trembled with laughter. “You’ve been reading too much science fiction. No, this is no parallel world. You don’t have 1984 over there and 1Q84 branching off over here and the two worlds running along parallel tracks. The year 1984 no longer exists anywhere. For you and for me, the only time that exists anymore is this year of 1Q84.” “We have entered into its time flow once and for all.” “Exactly. We have entered into this place where we are now. Or the time flow has entered us once and for all. And as far as I understand it, the door only opens in one direction. There is no way back.”

“And in this year of 1Q84, there are two moons in the sky, aren’t there?” “Correct: two moons. That is the sign that the track has been switched. That is how you can tell the two worlds apart. Not that all of the people here can see two moons. In fact, most people are not aware of it. In other words, the number of people who know that this is 1Q84 is quite limited.”

1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.”

Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow. Karl Jung said this about ‘the Shadow’ in one of his books: ‘It is as evil as we are positive … the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive.… The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacity to be perfect, the Shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil. For it is just as sinful from the standpoint of nature and of truth to be above oneself as to be below oneself.’

It’s just that I still have this vivid image of him ‘pulling rats out’ of blocks of wood with total concentration, and that has remained an important mental landscape for me, a reference point. It teaches me something—or tries to. People need things like that to go on living—mental landscapes that have meaning for them, even if they can’t explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations for these things.

Still, the two of us understood each other and accepted each other in a very natural way in every last particular—almost miraculously so. Such things don’t happen all that often in this life. For some people, they might never happen.

A dohta is just the shadow of the maza’s heart and mind in the shape of the maza.”

“The two moons cast the shadow of her heart and mind,” the baritone says.

“A more pressing problem for me is that I have never been able to love anyone seriously. I have never felt unconditional love for anyone since the day I was born, never felt that I could give myself completely to that one person. Never once.”

Ultimately, though, whether this world (or that world) had only one moon or two moons or three moons, there was only one Tengo. What difference did it make? Whatever world he was in, Tengo was just Tengo, the same person with his own unique problems and his own unique characteristics. The real question was not in the moons but in Tengo himself.

“Wherever there’s hope there’s a trial,” Aomame said.

“Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa.” The nurse shook her head. “Never heard of it.” “It was written in 1937. Dinesen was from Denmark. She married a Swedish nobleman, moved to Africa just before the First World War, and they ran a plantation there. After she divorced him, she continued to run the plantation on her own. The book is about her experiences at the time.”

“The biggest problem when it comes to being reborn,” the small nurse said, as if revealing a secret, “is that people aren’t reborn for their own sakes. They can only do it for someone else.”

“Unless you die once, you won’t be reborn,” Tengo confirmed.

He kept his ears open and listened closely to whatever anyone else had to say, aiming to learn something from everything he heard. This habit eventually became a useful tool. Through this, he discovered a number of important realities, including this one: most people in the world don’t really use their brains to think. And people who don’t think are the ones who don’t listen to others.

“I respect intuition,” Tamaru said. “But once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality. You would do well to remember that.” “Who said that?” “Wittgenstein.”

Subject and object are not as distinct as most people think. If the boundary separating the two isn’t clear-cut to begin with, it is not such a difficult task to intentionally shift back and forth from one to the other.

Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off.

People don’t just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts.

His face looked very peaceful. It was like—a windless day at the end of autumn, when a single leaf falls from a tree.