Recent Posts from Author
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Sex & Style in Murakami’s 1Q84, A Review — Part 2
By R Alexander
This is part 2 of 2 of a review of Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84. You can link to the first part here.
Structurally, non-realist narratives are no different from more standard “realistic” fictions. They create a narrative tension, often involving some sort of conflict, and then they resolve that tension in some way. What I’m addressing here is narrative structure, and what I’ve posited sounds simplistic, I suppose. Even if a story is non-realistic (as in, say, magical realism, surrealist fiction, slip stream stories, science fiction or fantasy, fabulist pieces, and whatever else), there is some sort of hook or some way that the reader can relate to what’s going on, and there is narrative tension built on conflict. In addition to this, stories provide a sense of closure, at or near their end. Non-realist stories tend to play with the conventions of these two aspects of story and to make that play an explicit part of the narrative. Kafka, for instance, tells the story of a person who turns into a bug. That story takes as its starting place an event that is impossible and also horrific. We can become involved in this story though, not because we are interested in entomology, but because we recognize something human in the situation. Sympathetic readers of the story will recognize that it is about, among other things, alienation, about the creaturely nature of our nature, and about family. So the story involves us in a very straightforward way. And the story has a very straightforward sense of closure at the end. The story ends with Gregor Samsa’s death and with changes that occur among the family because of it. -
Style & Plot in Murakami’s 1Q84, A Review — Part 1
By R Alexander
Haruki Murakami writes short stories and big novels where weird things take on strange importance: a disappearing cat leads to a detective type adventure, ears are erotic, jazz and classical music beckons and have magically transformative properties, abandoned wells harbor mysteries. Metaphysics as meaning seems to loom over his work. With each book he writes and as the books get longer, greater and greater claims are made concerning their importance. His latest work, 1Q84, is being called his magnum opus, and a great work of world literature. The book is so long, in fact, that Random House hired two translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, to work on it simultaneously so they could get it to press in a reasonable time. 1Q84 mainly concerns two people living in Tokyo in 1984 who, early in the novel, find themselves in a parallel or alternate universe. The novel’s title refers to one of the character’s name for the alternate universe. The “Q,” in 1Q84, stands for “question,” and there is apparently a sonic play on “Q” and “9” in the original Japanese, similar, I suppose to the orthographic play on or resemblance between the figures for “q” and “9” in English.
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R Alexander
R Alexander writes fiction, poetry, and essays and lives in the Pacific Northwest.
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