1Q84

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Fan Art : Two moons based on 1Q84

1Q84 is a novel by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami . The title alludes to 1984 , the year of the action. However, after events in the course of the plot, this year is renamed by the protagonist as 1Q84 . The "Q" stands for Question mark (Engl. For question mark ). This is also a play on words, as the letter “Q” and the number “nine” are pronounced kyū in Japanese . In addition, the novel makes several references to the novel 1984 by George Orwell .

publication

1Q84 is divided into three parts, each of which has been published as a separate book. In the Japanese-language original, Book 1 and 2 were published simultaneously on May 29, 2009 by Shinchōsha , Book 3 followed on April 16, 2010. The German translation of Book 1 and 2 was published on December 9, 2010 by DuMont Buchverlag , Book 3 followed on October 12, 2011.

content

Book 1 & 2

The author tells the stories of his main characters alternately in two storylines. Aomame, the daughter of a Jehovah's Witness family, and Tengo, the son of a radio license collector , are employed by their parents for their own purposes in their free time and thus find themselves in an outsider position in the 10-year-old class. This is how a shy childhood love develops between them. They then lose sight of each other, but later discover in their dreams that it is the love of their life.

The novel is set in Tokyo in 1984 , twenty years after their friendship . The two protagonists were transported by mysterious forces into the magical parallel world 1Q84 , which the main characters can see through a second moon . Little seems to have changed in everyday life, but the gnome-like Little People , acting out of the hidden, point to surreal deep structures of life: In the dispute about the order of the world, Tengo and Aomame fight with their supporters against that manipulated by the Little People , sect operating as an underground organization. But it is not a straightforward struggle of the good against the bad. The world and its conflicting forces are ambivalent and puzzling to the individual. A general danger arises when demonic forces disturb the balance (Book II, Ch. 13.).

The fitness trainer Aomame is uprooted by her childhood trauma and lets herself be driven by changing sexual relationships. That changes when she receives a task that she can identify with from a client, a feminist and the head of a women's shelter. The old lady hires her to avenge rape. In this role, she makes two major appearances. At the beginning of the novel, using a method previously developed for the revenge of her friend Tamaki, she murders the oil merchant Miyama because he seriously injured his wife with a golf club, and as a climax she kills the sect leader Tamotsu Fukada (II, 13). As the recipient of the Little People , he had the young girls of the commune who were not yet of childbearing age brought to him as priestesses with whom he was to beget his successor. His daughter was Fukaeri as Perceiver a medium of Little People . In his conversation with Aomame, Fukada, like the girls, presents himself as a victim of the dark forces, since he was always paralyzed during coitus, and asks her to kill him and thus free him from the coercion.

The math teacher and author Tengo Kawana comes into contact with the sect in a different way. He revises the manuscript of the 17-year-old dyslexic Fukaeri for the editor of a literary magazine Komatsu for a debut book competition. It is entitled The Doll Made of Air and is about the life of a girl in a sect and the mysterious work of the Little People (II, 19). As Tengo soon realizes, it is the story of the author, the daughter of the cult leader Fukada: Because she neglected her duties, she was locked in a room. There the mysterious Little People appeared , who together with her spun a cocoon out of threads of air that contained her own clone (called Doughter ), which could be interpreted as an indication of the loss of individuality and the problem of identity in the double world. These Doughters , i.e. H. the shadows of the girls, and not the mothers , ie the originals, act trance-like in the sexual rites with the leader who "hears the voices". Fukaeri left the sect as Doughter or Mother , as Tengo wonders, and since the publication of her book the Leader has not heard the voices of the Little People , i. H. he lost his prophetic skills.

After her escape from the commune, which her father had secretly prepared, Fukaeri lived with Professor Ebisuno and wrote down her fantastic experiences. The book caused a sensation and the author was hailed as a discovery by the press. Then she goes into hiding. Later she hides with Tengo, by whom she allows herself to be fertilized in a magical dream-like situation as a medium for Aomame, as if she were carrying out an order (II, 14). When investigating, the press, apparently Professor Ebisuno's intention, becomes aware of the sect and its machinations.

In the storyline of the novel, Tengo and Aomame approach each other through their actions to protect abused children and she learns about his editing of the book, with which she too was drawn into the story. In the end, Aomame, when trying to return to the world in 1984 , no longer finds the exit and wants to shoot himself. At that moment she thinks of Tengo, whose life threatened by agents of the sect she wants to save by disappearing from the world 1Q84 . At the same time, Tengo sees the lover in a vision during the visit of the unconscious father in the sanatorium: The 10-year-old Aomame (II, 24) is lying in bed in a doll. He interprets this as a sign that they will meet again, and that is a foretaste of the 3rd book.

Book 3

The two Tengo and Aomame storylines of the 1st and 2nd books have been expanded to include a third, that of the private detective Ushikawa. The continuation of the struggle of the women's rights activist Shizue Okata against the pioneers is told alternately from these three perspectives. On behalf of the sect, Ushikawa already offered a bribe packaged as a grant in Tengo's 2nd book to prevent the book from being published. Now he is supposed to find out the background to the murder of the leader Tamotsu Fukada and look for Aomames' hiding place. Through her biography he comes across the time they spent at school with Tengo and sees their relationship as the key to his investigations. He shadows Tengo and follows his path through the Koenji district, where Aomame also lives. After she accidentally observed him from her apartment where she is hiding, she informs Tamaru. This forces him to reveal his mission and suffocates him.

In the parallel plot, Tengo reflects on his father, who is in a coma and after his death, the unknown family structures and Aomame discovers that she has been pregnant since the leader was killed. She is sure that only her great love Tengo can be the father through magical processes. When Tengo and Aomame meet after the involved surveillance and persecution actions, they can clarify some connections in their enigmatic history (III, chapter 30): The procreation seems to be controlled by the Little People . Fukaeri served as the medium of transmission in her trance-like fertilization by Tengo. Both actions occurred at the same time during atmospheric tension from a storm created by the Little People . Matching this, Tengo saw little Aomame in a cocoon in a vision at the father's sickbed. Therefore, Aomame and Tengo fear that the pioneers want to get their child into their possession, because they hope that it could be a medium for messages from the Little People as Doughter . To prevent this, they flee from the world 1Q84 through the entrance portal in the opposite direction and come back to a world with only one moon. Here they want to realize their love and live together as a family, even if it may not be their old world of origin, but a third world with new dangers and challenges.

Acting persons

  • Masami Aomame , one of the two main characters, is a 30-year-old fitness trainer who, on behalf of a feminist who runs a women's shelter, commits revenge killings on men who have abused women.
  • Tamaki Otsuka , Aomame's first intimate friend in high school, is raped as a student. She escapes from her marriage to her brutal husband by suicide. Aomame kills him by stabbing him in the neck with her ice pick.
  • Ayumi Nakano , a 26-year-old police officer, is Aomame's friend, with whom she seeks male acquaintances. She is murdered on her last adventure, perhaps, as the cult leader suggests, to weaken Aomame.
  • The old lady Shizue Okata is about 76 years old suffragette who set up a house for abused women and recruits Aomame as a hired killer.
  • Tamaru , the old lady's bodyguard, organizes the murders for Aomame and protects her in her hiding place in Koenji.
  • Tengo Kawana , the other main character, is a 29-year-old math teacher. As a part-time writer, he brings Eriko's story into a literary form.
  • Kyoko Yasuda is Tengo's married lover. He receives news from her husband that his wife has been lost. The connection remains a mystery and could be understood as a warning from Ushikawa.
  • Kumi Adachi , a nurse at the Chikura sanatorium where Tengo's father is cared for.
  • The pioneers are a sect that operates a commune in the mountains of Yamanashi Prefecture .
  • The leader of the pioneers, Tamotsu Fukada , Fukaeri's father, is killed by Aomame.
  • Toshiharu Ushikawa , secret agent of the forerunner sect, collects information about Tengo and Aomame. As director general of a foundation for the promotion of the new Japanese sciences and arts, he makes Tengo the offer to receive a scholarship from the lavish funding program. To do this, he should stop researching Fukaeri's book and the sect. In Book 3, he becomes a main character. He already appeared in the earlier novel Mister Aufzugvogel
  • Eriko Fukada , called Eri or Fukaeri , is a 17-year-old girl who has lived with her parents in the community of pioneers from an early age. As a 10-year-old, she escaped from the rural commune, which was isolated from the public, and told her experiences of Ebisuno's daughter Azami, who sent the manuscript to Komatsu's editorial team.
  • Yuji Komatsu , editor and publisher of a literary and art magazine, persuades Tengo to revise the text and publishes it under the title The Doll Made of Air . The novel wins the debut award and draws public attention to the author and the sect.
  • Professor Takayuki Ebisuno , a cultural anthropologist, is Fukaeri's guardian. His family takes in the 10-year-old traumatized Eri after her escape and helps her to find her language again and to process her experiences.
  • Azami , his daughter, writes down the story Eri tells her and submits the manuscript for the competition.

reception

The FAZ praised the novel as a “work of art of temptation” and concludes with the conclusion: “Haruki Murakami has enriched his immensely popular and varied work with a novel that will not only delight the countless old friends of his prose.” Die Zeit writes about the Roman: "Murakami breaks with almost all customs of high literary finesse and writes a masterful colportage novel whose coldly calculated sentimentality one can hardly avoid." The Süddeutsche Zeitung praised the work in the features section as "captivating" and relates the quality primarily to the characters. Also Neue Zürcher Zeitung , taz and praised the book.

“With all of them, including the most famous Japanese authors, the Western reader always retains the impression of having missed something essential, as if these books were speaking in ciphers that actually mean something very different from themselves. Japanese literature is the most enigmatic in the world. Murakami also knows how to keep his secrets. But by virtue of his deep humanity, they are secrets for the whole world. Murakami was considered one of the candidates for the Nobel Prize this year. It's a shame he didn't get it. Not only would now have been exactly the right moment in the life and work of the now 61-year-old. Rather, he was able to do something that apparently no Japanese writer has done before him: to write literature that frees itself from its cocoon and opens up to the outside world. "

- Burkhard Müller : Süddeutsche Zeitung

expenditure

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Source: Book 1, Chapter 9, page 199
  2. ↑ Source: Book 1, Chapter 17, page 397. Towards the end of the First World War in 1918, she lived in Paris for a year at the age of 10.
  3. ↑ Source: Book 1, Chapter 2, page 38. Komatsu was forty-five, sixteen years older than Tengo.
  4. ↑ Haruki Murakami: 1Q84 - The sins of the fathers , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 15, 2010
  5. ↑ Iris Radisch: Heaven silently kissed the earth. In: The time. December 29, 2011, accessed in 2020 .
  6. ^ A book without a gram of fat too much , Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 19, 2010
  7. ↑ Review notes at perlentaucher.de
  8. ↑ Burkhard Müller: A rubber tree is the ideal relationship. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. October 19, 2010, accessed in 2020 .