Power...and Love

Last Friday I finished 1Q84! It was WONDERFUL! Extremely engrossing, the story had me lost in the book and reading every spare second I had. I ended up having to buy it on my iPad, too, so I could read whenever I didn't have the actual book on me. In my last post I wrote about powerlessness, and as I read more of 1Q84 this recurrent idea grew in scope and importance. DNA was brought into the equation, with the implication that our physical bodies are designed without any of our own input. There is also the idea that we have no control over the family we are a part of, as Tengo constantly wonders how his father in any way shares the same genetic material as him. cults, too, are a big element of the story. Many characters are, or once were, members of cults, where choices made by those in charge are followed without hesitation and creeds are obeyed with no questions asked. Faced with the authority of a cult, who has the power, the will, to leave? (Aomame certainly does, even at the age of 10, when she leaves the Society of Witnesses, a group of religious fanatics she was born into.) Furthermore, there is powerlessness in the idea of totalitarianism, which is a little more subtle but undoubtedly present in the novel. There are many in-text the references of George Orwell's 1984 and its story of a society under a totalitarian government, and 1Q84 takes place in the year 1984. There is also, of course, The Little People who are defined as "a will" and are a play on Orwell's Big Brother. Will, power, choice--these serve as a central focal point which 1Q84 revolves around, but the love between Aomame and Tengo, which I also mentioned in my last post, is even more at the center of the story. Throughout the whole novel the powerlessness that Aomame and Tengo are subject to, the feeling that their whole lives were sublty built around someone else's choices, is center-stage. Towards the end, however, it becomes clear that these two extraordinary characters (granted, with some help from others) have slowly been pulling themselves closer and closer together.

The novel is structured as a triptych, with the first two sections following Aomame and Tengo's increasing involvement with the religious cult group Sagikake. In the third section a third perspective is also introduced, who demonstrates the increasingly smaller distance between Aomame and Tengo. Overall, 1Q84 wasn't as "out there" as many of his other novels, but the this changed as the end got closer. A few days after I had started 1Q84, I realized I hadn't read quite as much Murakami as I thought; a good few novels awaited me! So I bought Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World on my Kindle. I'll write on that soon!