Quotes from 1Q84 book 3 by Haruki Murakami

I recently finished the mind-bending book, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Here are some quotes I want to share to see if they spark discussion. I'm still processing what I think of this book. I have given the quotations numbers to make them easy to reference. If you like, pick one and tell me what you think he is saying, whether you agree with it or not, and why you may think it is true or not.

1) Number one on the list now was a diet book entitled Eat as Much as You Want of the Food You Love and Still Lose Weight. What a great title. The whole book could be blank inside and it would still sell. 

2) Humans see time as a straight line. It's like putting notches on a long straight stick. The notch here is the future, the one on this side is the past, and the present is this point right here...But actually time isn't a straight line. It doesn't have a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn't have any form. But since we can't picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution. 

3) There are always far more people in the world who make things worse, rather than help out. 

4) It was a well-known fact that certain members of the so-called elite had disgusting personalities and dark, twisted tendencies, as if they had taken more than the share of darkness allotted to them. 

5) 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. 

6) I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. 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. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they've received. 

7) If you do the same things everyone else does, in the same way, then you're no professional.

Murakami's book has been a heavy heavy read. I don't recommend it for everyone. But it has given me lots of pause to stop reading and just think about what he has said.

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1Q84 Book Two by Haruki Murakami

First, I want to remind people that may not know, that Defying Gravity by author Cherie Reich is FREE all day today if you have an e-reader. Please click here to find out how to get yourself a copy.

This is not a book review although there are some things I will be talking about that could be considered spoilers.

I just recently finished book two of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.
I talked about book one in this post here.

In this particular novel a dowager (wealthy woman) hired Aomame to kill the head of a religious cult. His name was Leader. The dowager pointed out to Aomame that this man is guilty of raping pre-pubescent girls. As an empowered woman, Aomame felt that she could kill this man and avoid the justice system altogether which might be pre-disposed (because of the role of men in society) to treat this man kinder than he deserved. The only thing is, when she went to do the deed, she discovered that the Leader was IN FACT the victim in all of this sexual abuse from a cult that followed him. The man was in tremendous pain, was being raped while he was in a catatonic state as a devotion to the gods they believed in (called the Little People) and he wanted to die.

So she performs the most troubling assassination of her life.

As usual, the book is chock full of memorable quotes that make me think Murakami is a profound philosopher and not just a writer.

Additionally, Murakami includes a short story in his novel called the Town of Cats. This in itself is an accomplishment. I've seen other writers like Patrick Dilloway, who incorporate short stories into the greater length of their novel to illustrate a theme.

My post on Patrick Dilloway's book Where You Belong, is located Here.

The genius Haruki Murakami

I do put it on the same level as Murakami's writing. Only Murakami does not write literary fiction. But Murakami was up for a Nobel Prize and did sell a million of his books in Japan.

 If you would like to read Town of Cats, I will embed the link here to the New Yorker excerpt. To give you some background on it, one of the main characters goes to visit his father in a nursing home. He reads the "Town of Cats". This story is about a man who comes to a city that is deserted. But by night, it is occupied by intelligent speaking cats. Think "dogs playing poker" and you've got the image. But they smell the human amongst them and go searching for him. The man hides from the cats and evades them until daylight when the cats all leave. Later, he finds that he cannot escape because the train no longer stops there to pick any passengers up. So he is stuck in the town of cats.

This story is an allegory of 1Q84 which is a reflection of the real world 1984. However, there are subtle differences. The sky has two moons. The Little People are gods. And Aomame will never meet her true love  as long as she remains in 1Q84. But the way out of 1Q84 back to 1984 is no longer an option. That way is closed.

Murakami says through one of his characters, "Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or, then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away."

Maybe that's the purpose of life. To learn to cope and accept loss and to be thankful for the things that we do not lose. Maybe it is (like Aomame) to accept the fact that we cannot always get what we want and that the way home may be barred. Maybe Murakami is saying that it is just as important to find meaning in a world where we are alone among cats. What do you think?

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The Wisdom or Madness of Haruki Murakami

I just finished book one of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (he was a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature in 2011). I'm really enjoying this science-fiction novel (a big one when you consider that there are three books in one and thus over 1000 pages total), even though the "science-fiction" aspect of it seems to be at this point, specifically limited to two moons in the sky for one of the main characters, while the other, a writer, appears to be firmly rooted in the "real" world.

One of the characters, Tengo, is a writer, and he participates in publishing fraud by rewriting a brilliantly plotted novel whose idea originated in the mind of a girl who is illiterate. The other main character is a woman named Aomame who reveres her body as a temple, is bisexual, and has the skill to kill evil men with an icepick so that the deaths look natural. The story revolves around a bit of philosophy: If our collective memory is taken from us--is rewritten--we lose the ability to sustain our true selves. So Tengo rewrites a story of a teenage girl's and inadvertently she loses the ability to sustain herself.

Now, the story goes back and forth chapter by chapter between Aomame and Tengo. I have no idea if Aomame is the character being written about by Tengo (she seems just as real as Tengo to me but is living in a world with two moons), or how she ended up in the world with two moons other than the conscious decision to leave a taxi during a rush hour (a world with one moon), to climb down a utility ladder from the elevated expressway, and all so that she could meet a deadline in order to kill a very bad man. I find the fact that the taxi driver knew that her getting out of his car would change the universe in which she lived somewhat eerie. But I doubt if Murakami will ever return and explain how the driver knew anything at all much in the same way that J.J. Abrams provides very little as far as answers to fans of the television series LOST.

Aomame sees two moons in the sky. She is afraid to point it

out because she doesn't know if others in her world have

noticed or if she is the only one, and what exactly that might

mean. She is aware that the world is different.

One of the things that I find most intriguing about book one of 1Q84 are all the statements that Murakami makes about the profession of writing through the point-of-view of Tengo or through Komatsu (his unscrupulous editor). Here are some of them:

"It has absolutely none of the usual new writer's sense of 'I want to be another so-and-so'." <== interesting observation on all new writers, or no?

"Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it."

"When I'm writing a story, I use words to transform the surrounding scene into something more natural for me. In other words, I reconstruct it. That way, I can confirm without a doubt that this person known as 'me' exists in the world."

"He selected his words with all the care of a craftsman choosing the perfect piece of tile to fill a narrow gap in a bathroom floor...The slightest difference in nuance could bring the passage to life or kill it."

"The exact same text was subtly different to read when viewed on the printed pages rather than on the word processor's screen."

"[Editors] like [Komatsu] are looking for just one thing, and that is to find, if only once in their lifetimes, a work that is unmistakably the real thing. They want to put it on a tray and serve it up to the world."

"The conclusion of things is the good. The good is, in other words, the conclusion at which all things arrive. Let's leave doubt for tomorrow."

"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."

"The point of [writing about] a world that isn't here is in being able to rewrite the past of the world that is here."

What do you think of the statements Murakami makes about the business of writing and/or editing through the voices of his characters?

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