What’s that book he’s got there…

Hmm…

Ohh…

Yes, the street date has been broken for 1Q84. (Do we call it “one kew eight four” or “q-teen eighty four” in English?) I saw a tweet about a possible early release and decided to drop by the closest bookstore after work. Sure enough, there were copies of Book 1 sitting next to the other new hardbacks. They didn’t have Book 2, which is probably fine since I won’t be needing it for another month or so.

Immediate first impressions:

– It was expensive. 1800 yen, or just about $18. Do hardcovers in the US cost $36?

– It’s massive. 554 pages to be exact. I believe Book 2 puts the combined length at over 1000 pages.

– It probably features chapters with alternating stories. I’ve really only read through the index, but this is made clear by some kanji after the chapter numbers. Can’t confirm this because I haven’t read anything yet. Also haven’t looked up the kanji.

– The chapter titles are Pynchon/Fariña-esque. Also similar to Wind-up Bird. They’re more phrase-like than noun-like. At one point they also refer to “readers” (読者), although this could very well be readers within the book and not me and you.

– It takes place between April and June. The months (4月ー6月) are on the cover. I believe Book 2 has a different set of months.

– It looks more dense than his past books. Big blocky paragraphs. Not so much dialogue and short phrasing as in old works.

– It smells like a book.

I read the first sentence already. It’s going to be hard for me to stop myself from reading the rest until Friday, but that’s what I’ll do. After I wake up and have breakfast, I’ll dive right in. See you Friday morning.

I got the day off on Friday, so barring extreme personal injury, the 1Q84 liveblog will start at approximately 7 AM JST.

Murakami had a couple interesting things to say in an interview in the Spring volume of the Japanese magazine monkey business (translations are my own):

When I write a new novel, I say to myself, “This time, I’ll try doing this or this differently,” and establish several specific assignments for myself in terms of techniques, and for Norwegian Wood that [having scenes with three people talking] was one of the assignments. (33)

Afterdark clearly had some new techniques. It will be fun to see what he does this time. He drops a few hints about the “comprehensive novel” (borrowing Rubin’s translation of 総合小説), which he seems to imply is forthcoming and not the soon-to-be released (*fanboy squeal*) 1Q84:

So I’ve given that kind of novel the designation “comprehensive novel” as a kind of temporary name. People have all sorts of concepts for the designation comprehensive novel, so it’s easy to be mistaken, but what I think of as a “comprehensive novel” is basically one that’s long…and heavy. (laughs) And it’s a novel where all sorts of people, from remarkable people to normal people, appear one after the other, and many different perspectives are overlapped organically. Something like that. If you do that, then naturally, you won’t be able to write it in the first person. So when I mentioned earlier that if you look in at the big picture, my fiction has shifted from first-person to third-person, that’s what I was talking about. And in the end, that’s [towards a comprehensive novel] where I want to be heading.

Lots of different stories appear and intertwine into one, and there’s a certain type of sordidness, strangeness, seriousness, a chaos-like condition that can’t be compressed into one, all of that with a world view as a backdrop. When all those conflicting factors pile up into something like a melting pot, that’s the comprehensive novel I think of. And pretty soon I’ll be over 60, so I might not be able to get there as quickly as Dostoyevsky [who wrote The Brothers Karamazov at 59], but I think I’d like to gradually produce my own kind of comprehensive novel.

But it’s really hard work. And now, I’ve been writing a new full-length novel continuously for the last two years – I started writing it right on Christmas two years ago – so for that whole time, I was getting up every day at some time between 2 and 4 in the morning and writing for four or five hours. During that period, I did take time off for vacation, but I think it was only about 10 to 20 days. Sitting there in front of my desk everyday for four to five hours straight, that was pretty tough. (56-57)

Two more days to kill.

I just got this as a comment on the old Blogsome version of this blog. Pretty interesting stuff:

The following is a fragment that has been removed from Wikipedia’s page, but it is worth thinking about and posting somewhere.

The Internet is rife with speculation as to the possible meaning of the title, with various theories including a pun on [[George Orwell]]’s [[Nineteen Eighty-Four]], a belief supported by the Murakami scholar Shojo Fujii, who claims that it is to be understood as “I am Q”, from [[Lu Xun]]’s novella [[The True Story of Ah Q]], to a claim that it has to do with the chromosomal location of [[acetylcholinesterase]] in humans and rat’s, on chromosome 1 (which is inaccurate; chromosomal locations are not designated quite this way.). This reference would suggest that the book has some reference to the [[Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway|Aum Shinrikyo gas attack]], which used [[sarin]] gas, which targets this critical enzyme.

However, the [[Protein Data Bank]] [[X-ray crystallography|protein crystal structure]] identifier for mouse acetylcholinesterase is labeled 1Q84, suggesting that this lattermost interpretation bears some credence. This is further supported by cover images[[http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://virtualsushi.livejournal.com/]] Retrieved on May 20, 2009 which bear the dates 1985 (the year of the founding of the [[Aum Shinrikyo]] cult), 1994 (the year of the [[Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway|Aum Shinrikyo gas attack]]), 2002 (whose meaning is unclear, perhaps the date of a survey suggesting that the public still does not trust the [[Aum Shinrikyo|Aleph]] group, and 2009 (perhaps the date of publication?).

Some nice informed speculation there, but I think the bit about the dates is digging too deep. It’s not on the cover, but on the publisher’s site – here. If you click on the date, it takes you to a page promoting the novel Murakami published in that year. Shinchōsha is basically using the new novel to promote their old ones. Here is the page of my predictions for the novel.