Private Vote? Hah!

Whoops! I voted nearly a month ago, and I forgot to betray the confidence of the ballot box here. Mea culpa. I'll do as best I can, and spill the beans before the results come in tonight.

This was just a local election, without any fun state-wide ballot initiatives, so it's a much smaller set of choices than usual. Without further ado:

This was my first vote for Millbrae city council. Three four-year seats were up for election, meaning we'll be electing the majority on the five-seat council.

My first and easiest vote was for Robert Gottshchalk. Millbrae is kind of interesting, in that the council is term-limited to two consecutive terms, but there's no limit on the total number of terms a member can serve. Someone can serve for eight years, then sit out for two or more years, then run for re-election, which is exactly what Gottschalk is doing. I've never lived in Millbrae while he's been on the council, but he was still the mayor when I started my homehunting expedition, so I'm fairly familiar with his prior work as councilmember and mayor, and I was really impressed. He's an excellent example of someone who has a big, positive vision for the future of the city, while also being well tuned-in to the day-to-day realities… he can decide the small steps we should take today in order to get where we want to be a decade from now.

My second vote was for Wayne Lee, who is the only Chinese-ancestry candidate in the race (Paul Seto decided not to run for re-election after serving just one term). Lee seems to want to invest in the city, strengthening our (already pretty nice) downtown and helping make the city better. That might sound like meaningless boosterism, but it's actually pretty significant in the present economic and political climate; a lot of people get overly focused on the short-term present pains, without thinking about how they can help grow revenues over the long run.

I actually agonized for a while over my third vote, before deciding to cast it for the one incumbent seeking re-election, Marge Colapietro. On the investment/thrift continuum, she skews a little more towards fiscal conservatism than I personally do, but I think that's a helpful perspective to have represented on the council. Plus, on the whole I've been very happy with the way the council has performed, so it makes sense to keep that going.

The Millbrae school district put a bond measure on the ballot, primarily to improve Taylor middle school's cafeteria and also to help with some other infrastructure needs. I gladly voted in favor. I would have preferred a parcel tax to a bond (it's always better to pay money than to borrow and spend), but in the current political climate taxes are very difficult to pass, so I'll accept the form of a bond.

I feel a bit bad about this, but I voted against the community college issue… I totally get why they're going for it, since the state has been slashing its share of funding. Still, I had a hard time swallowing the price tag for what they had planned for improvements. The infrastructure improvements sounded good, but not critical; and as with most of these things, it doesn't look like the measure would help with operations, just with expansion. I'd certainly be open to revisiting the community college issue if it comes back next fall or later.

I don't know enough about the community college district to make informed decisions about the board elections. I THINK I voted to re-elect the incumbents, but had a third available vote that I didn't cast.

And, that's that! Hooray for democracy!

Up to It

Okay! Now that I've finished reading Terry Pratchett's excellent new Discworld novel, "Snuff", I believe I can go back to my standard reading habits for the next few years while I wait for another batch of glorious new books to descend.

Snuff isn't just a Discworld novel, but a member of the most prized strain within that corpus, known as a Watch/Vimes book. I've enjoyed all Discworld, but the books set in Ankh-Morpork are always the best, and the Watch books (along with the nascent Moist books) tend to contain the highest proportions of things I like: Vetinari, CMOT Dibbler, Nobby Nobbs, the media, hordes of chaotically coexisting races, and more. I have to say that Snuff isn't my favorite of the Watch books - it's probably towards the middle of the pack, or maybe a bit lower - but still one of the more enjoyable Discworld books.

MINI SPOILERS

It's pretty amazing to consider, given the sheer number of entries within Discworld, but the series does maintain overall continuity, with each new novel set chronologically after the ones preceding it. In many cases, such as novels with the Witches, this tends to have a subtle effect, since events tend to return more or less to the status quo at the end of each book. However, Sam Vimes has gotten a really incredible arc throughout the course of his series. He regularly gets promoted to higher positions of responsibility; the Watch regularly adds new, and memorable, characters, who become permanent parts of future books; Vimes always grumbles against admitting a new race to the ranks of the Watch, only to admit a book or two later that they're among the most useful coppers; and over time he has sobered up, gotten married, and had a son. In Snuff, Young Sam is now old enough to walk on his own, and is quite talkative, particularly on the subject of poo.

Snuff really only has two failings, so I'll get them out of the way now. First, it badly needed more editing; particularly in the first third of the book, there are an embarrassing number of mismatched quotation marks, typos, and places where the word used is simply wrong. (For some reason, a publican is repeatedly referred to as the "landlord," a term that certainly must refer to Vimes.) Secondly, while this is a Watch novel, it continues the recent trend towards dispatching Vimes to a far-off locale, and so there's a shortage of Ankh-Morpork humor to be found, and much less of the other Watch members than we would usually see. There is some tradeoff here - in particular, we get to see a born-and-bred city boy's perception of life in the country - but on the whole, life on the Plains isn't as target-rich as life in the city.

Sam is ostensibly on holiday, but sure enough, he stumbles into evidence of a crime, which may be connected to a larger conspiracy. He reasonably suspects, but we can never prove, that Vetinari was responsible for his dispatchment here. We do eventually get some brief time with other Watch personnel - Carrot serves as interim Commander (and manages to complete all of Vimes' tardy paperwork within one day); Fred gets infected in a very minor plotline that gets loosely tied in with Vimes' investigation, and Nobbs, Angua, Littlebottom and Wee Mad Arthur all help him get better. Wee Mad Arthur's parts were the best of the bunch. I still haven't read Pratchett's children's novels Wee Free Men, but it sounds like he has retconned Wee Mad Arthur from being a gnome (which he was at the time of Night Watch) into one of the Nac Mac Feegle. I approve of crossovers, particularly in a universe as broad and varied as Pratchett's, and we get a bit of dialog explaining the Feegle and their habits. Honestly, the whole section with the Watch felt a little extraneous - it could have been cut entirely and the main Vimes story would still have made sense - but I'm glad that Pratchett kept it in there, because I love those characters so much.

Other than those quibbles, though, I had a great time with the book. Moving to a new location allows Pratchett to introduce a larger than usual new cast of characters, which allows for some nice speculation as to who can be trusted and who is guilty. We also see much more of Vimes' home life than I think we've gotten before; instead of pecking Sybil on the cheek before he rushes out on a pursuit, we see several long exchanges between the two over dinner, in bed, and at a variety of social functions. It's quite funny (and Pratchett is still the master at the two-level double-entendre), and further enriches our understanding of already well-developed characters. It's a hoot to see Young Sam growing up, too; he seems well on his way to combining the most admirable qualities of his mother and his farther, while often baffling both of them.

The Watch (and Moist) books tend to contain Pratchett's most pointed and effective satire, and you can usually summarize a book pretty accurately by identifying which humanistic theme it conveys. Thud! was about race relations, how mutual distrust grows over time, and how to break the cycle of retribution. Night Watch was about the division between the Law and Power, and how the civil authority's highest responsibility is to the institution of the law itself, and not to the officials on top. I feel like Snuff doesn't really break open a new theme, but mingles several from earlier books. That sense of division between power and law is a strong one, this time playing out in a small tight-knit community rather than the chaos of an urban rebellion. It feels like the treatment of the goblin race is the latest of a process that has previously been played out for trolls, golems, vampires, and werewolves. The goblins' problem seems to be that they are sub-human (unlike, say, the vampires, where the problems was that all were seen as dangerous), and so people can get away with treating them like animals. As usual, we learn to differentiate from the mass of "the goblins" and get to know one or two in particular, see their admirable qualities (while still getting to laugh at their unusual habits), and eventually one becomes a member of the Watch and Discworld moves one step closer to racial harmony.

One oddity of this book: Death never makes an appearance. I hesitate to say that it's the first book where he doesn't show up at all - there are a LOT of books, and I could easily be overlooking something - but we almost always get a glimpse of him, even if just for a sentence or two. It's a puzzling absence; my immediate thought would be that Pratchett's current situation would discourage him from wanting to get too close to Death, but he's been quite vocal in real life about getting comfortable with death, so it doesn't seem like that's a likely reason. Maybe there just wasn't room for him, or maybe Pratchett wanted specifically to focus on life (particularly as seen in Young Sam) rather than death.

END SPOILERS

I'm delighted that we got another chance to meet Vimes and see how he's doing in the world. He has been the most consistently enjoyable member of the widespread Discworld saga, and this entry does not disappoint. Like all of Pratchett's best books, this one made me chuckle, made me think, and made me feel. It's a worthy addition to the series.

With her eyes like a flame

Enough culture - it's TV time!

I've finished watching the two (and, so far, only) seasons of Luther, an amazing British crime import. First of all, I am now even more impressed with Idris Elba than before - he's now entered that rare cadre of actors whose work makes me want to see everything they're in. Between this and his work in The Wire, I've gotten a good feel for his range, which is quite good - each individual character is fully-realized and committed, so you don't get a huge range within Stringer Bell or within Luther, but the union of the two reveals his impressive acting chops.

I've commented on this before, but on a purely superficial level, there are significant overlaps between Luther and House. Both feature incredible performances from talented British actors; both play characters who work in high-stakes, life-or-death institutions; both are rogue agents who make choices that frequently risk the life and health of innocents, but whose superiors have no choice but to accommodate them due to their immense skill; both are fairly episodic shows but have longer serial plots that cover and span seasons; both open with incredible songs from Massive Attack that I'll never get tired of hearing.

That said, House is clearly an American show (if a more cynical one than we usually see), and Luther is clearly a British show. That means the seasons are quite short - six one-hour episodes for the first season; the second season was presented as four one-hour episodes, but it's really two two-hour movies. It has a way darker sensibility, too. The show is relentlessly violent and bloody, not to mention bloody-minded. The characters are all English, and in a few cases I found myself having trouble tracking their accents (Luther and the more cultured characters speak quite clearly, but many of the other detectives and suspects have a strong London accent that makes them hard to understand when they speak quickly).

MEGA SPOILERS

The other great BBC detective show I've seen recently, Sherlock, has its own set of overlaps with this show, mainly in terms of plot. I'm not totally clear on the chronology of the two shows - when each started shooting, when it aired in the UK, when it aired here - but I'm guessing/hoping that they weren't aware of each other during their first seasons, because both of them rely on a twist about how nobody would ever suspect a London cabbie of being a murderer. They both use pretty much the same reasoning, too - it's someone who people would trust implicitly, even if they don't know them. In both shows, the actual cabbie turns out to be a thoroughly ordinary-looking person. In Sherlock, this elevates the chilling scariness of the whole sequence - he seems like a harmless man, even though he plays the role of evil incarnate. In Luther, he becomes an amazingly pathetic villain. He's a failure at life, and a failure as a killer, and his miserable little life is ended.

The first season seemed to draw from a highly varied and memorable list of villains: some were very high-class, like Alice and the guy who's a best-selling author and leader of a Satanic cult. Others, like the cabbie, were very low-class, memorable in their squalor. The second seasons' villains, though, were creepy because of just how ORDINARY they looked. I doubt anyone would look at those people twice if they passed them on the London streets. There's a huge gap between our image of these people and the atrocities they perform. To me, it felt like we weren't just watching some super-genius outsider criminal; we were watching the decay of English society itself, the birth of a culture whose very foundation could be twisted to evil.

Speaking of which... I found myself thinking a LOT about the differences between English and American culture presented in the show. At the start of the final episode in the second season, there's a long sequence where a policeman is chasing down a murderer who has struck in a public train terminal. The policeman keeps shouting, "Stop that man!", but even though they're running through a crowd, nobody stops, nobody wants to get involved. The citizenry seems cowed. I have a hard time imagining that happening in a major American city - we still have enough cowboy in our veins that SOMEONE would have intervened and helped out a policeman.

That was the most dramatic example in the series, but looking back over it, it seems to be in keeping with the show in general. There's a very clear demarcation between law and crime, and also a pronounced role for those who don't fit into either camp. I don't think we once see a citizen volunteering information that helps in an investigation. Obviously, I don't know enough about London culture to say whether that's realistic, or if it's a grim noir atmosphere contrived by this show for a strong effect.

One similarity I found was the protection of suspects' rights. I was a little surprised to see this; I don't watch a whole lot of British detective shows, but from the ones I have seen, I don't recall suspects being advised of their right to silence, etc. I know that this sort of thing isn't universal - in particular, in France police can arrest someone without a warrant, and have much more flexibility in how they conduct interrogations. The more I think about it, though, it makes sense that we'd have this similarity. The UK and America are both common law countries, after all, and the American judicial code is basically a direct descendent of the Magna Carta. Details will always vary, but the idea of the law itself as a supreme institution that's above everyone, even the most powerful individuals, binds our countries together, and informs the way we pursue justice.

Topic hop: Alice was arguably the best part of the show, maybe even more so than Luther himself. She's absolutely captivating every second she's on screen; her combination of beauty and danger takes everyone's breath away, even someone as thoroughly capable as Luther. I was really hoping that they would join forces more directly in the second season. One of the advantages of the British shorter-form television season is that they can be more experimental; it's more like a mini-series than a series, so they can do dangerous things and take a program in an unexpected direction, and not need to worry so much about writing themselves into a corner. (You would think that an American show with 23 episodes would cover more plot ground than a British show with 6 episodes, but if the American show shakes things up halfway through the season, they need to fill another 11 episodes that all have to acknowledge that change, while the British show can just treat it naturally and then end things.) All that to say, I think they could have gotten away with Luther actually leaving the police force... probably not leaving London, but perhaps becoming a private detective (do they have those in England? Would he be the world's second consulting detective?), or even the shadowy underworld figure that the various criminals want him to become. As it was, I was very sad that Alice didn't make an appearance at all in the last two episodes, which were otherwise quite good.

I guess that Mark dropped out, too. Ah, Mark. I really liked the way they handled him in the first part of the second season. I was never quite sure of what to think of him in the first season - we're supposed to hate him, since he stole Luther's wife away from him, but he's such a thoroughly decent person and such a good match for Zoe... but he's also overly passive and a bit too calm... well, we see him again once his world has been broken, and my heart breaks for him. It makes no sense that he and Luther would be friends now, and yet it also makes perfect sense - they're united in their love, not for one another, but for someone who's forever gone.

END SPOILERS

Quick thoughts on a few other shows. I'm actually pretty happy with The Walking Dead so far. None of the episodes has been as good as Season One's premiere, but I feel like the average quality so far has been better than the average quality last season. Most of the annoying characters have been eaten off, and we're getting a good chunk of zombie mayhem each episode, along with some good ongoing development.

MINI SPOILERS

In particular, the major non-zombie plot so far has revolved around Carl's accident. I'm struck by how much of the zombie atmosphere and design has infected these scenes, even in the absence of any infection. Carl's deathly white skin pallor... his sudden shifts between seeming death and animation... his uncontrollable jerking movements in bed... all very creepy, and it thematically links his private ordeal to the global crisis, even when there's no direct tie between the two. There's also, of course, a big obsession with blood. That might be a bit more appropriate in a vampire drama than a zombie drama, but it still fits. Carl has an insatiable desire for fresh blood to remain among the living, while the many zombies we see have an insatiable desire for fresh blood to remain among the walking dead.

I have trouble remembering everyone's names, so I use nicknames for everyone. Rick is Good Cop, Shane is Bad Cop. Boy, Shane has been on a tear lately - that reveal at the end of the third episode was just chilling. Just when I think I can like him again, he has to destroy it all. Rick seems to be pure goodness, and it's easy to root for him, but man, his opening monologue at the start of this season was probably the most annoying thing the show has ever done. I like all the other male characters, but other than Lori, all the women are seriously aggravating me. Which is, of course, well in keeping with zombie fiction practice: we're supposed to have at least some idiotic characters who make bad decisions that cause us to slap our heads and yell at the screen. Well. Part of me is hoping that Andrea and Carol get eaten, and the women from the farmhouse take their place. I'm a bad person.

END SPOILERS

Dexter is... fine. I'm surprised at just how much I'm enjoying Mos Def's Brother Sam character, who seems like he should be insufferable (given the really tone-deaf treatment of religion in the first episode), but has taken off. We'll see if he sticks around for the season. Edward James Olmos seems to be wasted as half of the villain team. I'm liking the new cop character, and am curious if he'll become a less-caffeinated version of Doakes in a season. Last week's episode didn't have any LaGuerta at all, which means it's automatically one of my favorite episodes. So far the show seems to be handling Deb's promotion well, using it to expand her character in believable ways. We'll see where the show goes. There's definitely a lot of amazing potential in using Revelation as a kill gimmick, and so far the show hasn't shied away from maximizing it.

Kyuu

Phew! I plowed through the last third of 1Q84. It ends quite well - it doesn't wrap everything neatly up, of course (no Murakami novel has ever done so), but I think it will satisfy most readers hoping for some sort of resolution or closure. It's more akin to the closing of, say, "A Wild Sheep Chase" than to "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World."

For the most part, the third volume continues the things I loved about the first two volumes. The plot directly continues, we get more exploration into the characters' backgrounds, and a few mysteries are resolved. There are several differences as well, some of which must be structural changes from the original Japanese text, others might be from Murakami or from the translator. In particular, I think that the first part of the book used metric units (certain individuals of short stature are described as being about a meter tall), while the last part used imperial units (those same individuals are about a yard tall). Also, while I loved the language, the last part of the book did seem to introduce some tics that I wasn't as fond of.

MINI SPOILERS

Tengo in particular, and I think some other characters as well, come down with severe cases of echolalia - lots of "dialogs" are more like monologues with an echo, as someone will say something like "Sakigake is searching for a dohta," and Tengo will say, "Sakigake is searching for a dohta." It isn't actually annoying, but is a bit perplexing. It's a bit similar to his conversations with Fuka-Eri in the first volume, though I kind of preferred those, because in those cases he's kind of trying to translate her by turning her statements into questions (or, in the Japanese, adding a "ka" to the end of what she says). Here, I'm not too sure what purpose it serves, either in the story or stylistically. (I'm not saying that there is no purpose, so if anyone has thoughts about what the significance might be, please let me know!)

Other than those very minor complaints, though, I pretty much loved the ending. The biggest and most noticeable change is the introduction of another point of view: in addition to Tengo's and Aomame's perspectives, we now get Ushikawa's as well. This was a really nice way to open up the story a bit, still keeping the focus on the central relationship between the would-be lovers and adding some more perspective on their situation. I thought the choice of Ushikawa was an interesting one; personally, I would have loved to get inside the head of a character like Komatsu, who is already involved in the plot and has a lot of personality. Ushikawa has some great personality too, though. He's definitely an outsider, and I enjoyed the way Murakami treated him... he honors Ushikawa's skills, but makes sure that we don't develop too much sympathy for him. I was vaguely reminded of Flaubert's treatment of Charles - we're getting a full, three-dimensional character with some admirable qualities, but we're not meant to actually like him too much.

So, yeah... Ushikawa has been involved in the story for a while, and we got to know him pretty well through his association with Tengo, and now we can actually peer inside his head, into his sad, slight life. Again, he's kicked around by society, and I do like the way he can plow ahead and do a good, thorough job even with the social impediments caused by his massive ugliness. He occupies an interesting spot, working for the villains but under just as much threat from the villains as the heroes are.

The second volume ended very dramatically, with Tengo and Aomame both perched on the edge of huge developments: Aomame had discovered that she couldn't return to the real world and was a few millimeters from ending her life; Tengo had rediscovered his memory's version of Aomame, seemingly presented to him through the auspices of the Little People. Both of those developments are necessarily backed away from in this last book. Aomame just changes her mind, and gets on with her life; soon, she renews her focus on reuniting with Tengo. Tengo never again sees that air chrysalis with Aomame, though he patiently waits for it for a long time.

Several new elements were very successful. I thought that the NHK fee collector was probably the scariest part of the whole book, right up there with the Little People. Part of that may have to do with some social phobias of my own - I get uncomfortable when strangers come knocking at my door, and the kind of verbally abusive and judgmental ire that the NHK fee collector doles out are the stuff of my nightmares. I really like the way that Murakami spins out this scenario, across multiple doors, multiple visits, and a varying set of tactics that tightly orbit around a very mean core. I also like how Murakami dangles a very intriguing explanation before us - that Tengo's father, whose body is gripped by a coma, is sending forth his spirit to do the only thing he was ever any good at, abuse people to make them pay up. It's interesting how Tengo himself is never visited by the specter, but others close to him are. The collector doesn't seem to have any great supernatural insight - in particular, he doesn't know the actual names of the people staying in the apartments, just the names listed in the building. That makes me wonder if his spirit may actually be making rounds throughout the whole neighborhood, but can only be perceived by those who are aligned with Tengo's story... similarly to how only some people can perceive the two moons.

MEGA SPOILERS

Speaking of which: we get an interesting twist on the whole moons/worlds question in this volume. I'm still not sure what the final situation is, but in the first part of the book, my working hypothesis was that Fuka-Eri initially created the new world by the introduction of the Little People/Story. Then, Tengo entered into that world, and became important to it, by embellishing the story and bringing it to an audience. Finally, Aomame was drawn into it because of her emotional connection with Tengo. In this book, though, it seems more like that sequence is inverted. The world still might have come into existence because of Fuka-Eri, but the novel seems to say that Aomame entered into that world by herself, by her own actions, when she walked down that stairway. This connects nicely with the introduction we get in that very first chapter, of course. Tengo, too, might have followed into the world after Aomame. She presumably was in the new world from the first chapter on; Tengo doesn't seem to have entered it until after he wrote the book. (It's possible that he was in earlier, but given that he invented/discovered the details of the two moons, I place his entrance several chapters in.) In this new reading, it seems like Tengo might have a one-way trip into the world, since he arrived by writing and can't un-write the book; however, Aomame has a two-way path, since she physically entered into it and can retrace her steps back out.

The whole thing is so romantic and lovely, isn't it? It's a little like the myth of Orpheus, but this time it's the woman who travels into a dangerous place, and brings back her beloved.

Minor (but very spoilery) thoughts...

Very creepy that we get more Little People! Now that we've seen two cases of them entering the world, we can draw some conclusions, I guess. It looks like (other than through air chrysalises) they can only enter through being who die, and whose bodies are not disposed of in a timely manner. The goat was left in the cave for days before they emerged; Ushikawa's body had suffered rigor mortis, and they wouldn't be able to cremate it for several more days. I love how this totally invented creepy mythology nicely reinforces our mores and morals about how to handle the dead.

I'm also curious about exactly what world the new Little People are in. Is a new world created each time they emerge? Or have they found a new gateway into 1Q84 after losing Leader and hope of Aomame's child? Or (creepiest of all) have they made it into our world? I'm reminded of the emphatic words of the taxi driver at the very beginning, who insists that there's only one reality. Most of the rest of the book seems to disagree with that; I and the characters spend much of our time thinking about the world of 1984, and the world of 1Q84, and the differences between them and how to return to 1984. But, what if the taxi driver was right? What if, when Aomame went down that staircase, she didn't CREATE a new world, but CHANGED the existing one? In that case, walking up the staircase doesn't transport Tengo and Aomame back to the "real" world, but instead changes the one world back to the way it was before. In that case, though, the Little People have found their way into our reality... into the only reality. Brrr.

I was really, really expecting for the same taxi-driver who dropped Aomame off to be the one that picked them up. I liked the way that Murakami handled this, though. It's a nice call-back to the beginning without being overly symmetrical. And, really, it's very appropriate for what the story has done. At this point, Tengo and Aomame's journey is over; they don't need any more special help from outsiders, they now have each other, and can spend the rest of their lives exploring one another and building a future together.

END SPOILERS

Yep... this was a very, very good book. In addition to all of its other qualities - the amazing language, funny dialog, fascinating plot, surreal imagery - I'm really struck by how well it works as a novel about novels. Not just in the superficial sense of having a book within a book, but it seems profoundly interested in the CREATive aspects of fiction, the way that we build worlds with our words. In the text of this book, it isn't just something to play around with, but a very real and meaningful way that we can touch one anothers' lives, alter our reality, change the course of history, discover our soulmates. In some ways, 1Q84 reads like a love-letter to writing, penned by the master of stories. It's an absolutely remarkable achievement.

1323

I've been flying through Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. It's a really massive book, a bit over 900 pages in a large hardcover. Or, to be a bit more accurate, it's three good-sized books that have been put into one binding for the American market, in kind of an inverse from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Despite the length, it's been an incredibly engaging read for me so far. The plot moves along at a nice clip, with a steady trickle of revelations and explanations and new mysteries, but more than that, the language is as beautiful as always, drawing me ever more deeply into the story.

I've just finished the second book, at a tad under the 600 page mark, and figured I'd take this opportunity to jot down some initial reactions to the book. First of all, my head feels full to overflowing, and I'm worried that I'll lose some of these memories if I wait much longer. Second, from the little I've heard about the book's release in Japan, it sounds like Murakami had initially intended the story to end after the second book. There, the first two volumes were written together, and published separately on the same day; then, after they came out, Murakami decided that he wasn't finished yet, and returned for a third book. (He says that he doesn't plan on writing a fourth volume, but is also unwilling to rule out the possibility.)

I very deliberately stayed away from as much knowledge about 1Q84 as possible during the (very long!) run-up to its US release. This was a LONG process. I've mentioned before that I attended a Murakami interview at UC Berkeley back in 2008, where he announced that he had just finished "... a BIG book." Despite the voracious and growing appetite for Murakami here in the states (a trend which I whole-heartedly endorse), it still took them about three years to translate it, even after dividing the work among two translaters. Jay Rubin translated the first two volumes; Rubin has translated a majority of the most recent Murakami novels, including masterpieces like The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and After the Quake. Philip Gabriel, who translated my personal favorite Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore, handled translation duties on the third volume. Personally, I think it would have been amazing if they could have gotten Alfred Birnbaum to do the first volume, which would have made the whole effort nicely reflect the chronology of bringing Murakami to America's attention. Alfred Birnbaum was responsible for translating Murakami's very first books into English, long before anyone here had any idea who he was, and this includes some of the most touching and idiosyncratic works, like A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

It's been pretty fascinating to consider the various translators and how they interact in creating our perception of who Murakami is and what his books mean. I get the impression that most fanatic Murakami devotees settle on a favorite translator, and that's usually the first one they encounter; the early adopters who "discovered" Murakami before he was "cool" will swear by Birnbaum's style and construction. More recent converts like myself are mesmerized by the intricate yet unadorned sentences found in Rubin. Ultimately, of course, 99.99% of American readers won't ever be able to compare the English with the Japanese versions of these novels, and so it's nearly impossible for us to disentangle what parts that we admire are from the original author, and which hail from the translator.

The surprisingly strong publicity campaign for 1Q84 has included a lot of interesting extra information around this book and these issues, including some great interviews with the translators about, well, translating. Rubin and Gabriel had to do their work in parallel in order to bring the book to market on time. Rubin got a head start, but also had more work to do. This sounds like it led to a fascinating three-way collaboration, where the translators would share notes with each other to make sure that they were being reasonably consistent with one another, and checking in with Murakami once a week or so to help resolve any items that they found particularly difficult or confusing. While they were collaborative, it doesn't sound like any one was dictatorial, which ultimately led to more variety and more flavor. A few tidbits that I recall from an interview with The Atlantic: Gabriel tends to use more contractions (like "it's" and "they'll") than Rubin or Birnbaum; but, in this case, he ended up using fewer than usual in order to match the sound of the earlier volumes. There was some discussion around how to translate the slangy name of one minor character who appeared in both volumes Two and Three. One suggested "Buzzcut", the other thought "Skinhead". They eventually brought this to Murakami, who cast the deciding vote for Buzzcut. Even after all the translation was done, it still passed through a final American editor who helped pull everything together and make the work as a whole unified.

It probably helps matters a lot that Murakami is not only fluent in English, but also an avid reader of American novels. He has famously translated many great American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver (all of it!), and J. D. Salinger. I imagine that this significantly helps his engagement with the translation, as he can not only weigh in on the most literal equivalent for a Japanese phrase, but also what words are most likely to convey a similar emotion or sentiment. That being said, all the translators have cheerfully denied any hope of truly capturing Murakami's essence in any language other than Japanese. Which is just incredible - given that Murakami is possibly my favorite contemporary author, the thought that he might be even BETTER than the diminished form in which I encounter him just blows my mind.

Oh, yeah, there's also a fun video out there that describes the design of the book - how they (meaning Chip Kidd) came up with the jacket cover, the endleaf pages, and so on. There are minor spoilers within the video, so if you want to remain 100% pure you should hold off, but this was one of the few things I consumed before reading the book and it didn't affect my enjoyment of it.

Since this book is so new, I'll be more cautious than usual in my spoiler marking. I'm avoiding any plot or character revelations whatsoever up here. I'll generally and vaguely cover characters and a bare minimum of early plot develops in mini spoilers. Mega spoilers are fair game for everything in the first two volumes.

So: just how good is this book?

Pretty darn good. I feel like it's still sinking in, but so far I've just been loving it. I'm enjoying it much more than the most recent Murakami novel(la), "After Dark". At the moment I'd put it at about the same level as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

The book has a lot of the elements that I love about most of Murakami's novels: the realistic world that gradually slips into a slightly askew, dreamlike environment; the pleasant people who are swept up by baffling events; the portentous omens that heighten stakes while remaining opaque. His writing is probably even better than before, and it was already excellent. He perfectly captures emotions, tableaus, the beats of conversation, the silences within conversation. I think it's that combination that makes me most love Murakami: even though the cores of his stories are often mysterious, each sentence is sparklingly clear.

Oh, and he's funny, too. This isn't a comedy, of course - while Murakami has written some flat-out comedic short stories, like The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes, I don't think he's ever written a fully comedic novel - but the characters' wry observations on their untenable situations often make me crack up, as do their musings on the world around them. And, some of those thoughts can also bring me close to tears. The center of this novel is driven by... a kind of lacuna, an aching gap, and while I sometimes feel like this was written specifically for me, I'm guessing that most readers will feel the same way, so effectively does Murakami convey that particular heartache.

Okay, that's all very vague. Let's dip into some

MINI SPOILERS

Structurally, 1Q84 bears some similarity to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. As with that book, this one follows strictly alternating chapters, each told from a distinct point of view. Here, the voice is third-person, and the limited narrator seems to be the same or similar, as opposed to the very different voices in HBW. But still, there's a similar rhythm that the book gets into, and in each chapter, while I'm getting progressively more interested in Tengo's or Aomame's stories, I'm simultaneously looking forward to seeing what the other character has in store.

For both characters, we gradually learn more about each as the story progresses; in a way, we're moving both forward and backwards in time. Both of them are around thirty years old (like me!). We see what they're doing in the present day; as they keep doing it, we learn about the people who brought them into these situations; and gradually, we learn about their experiences in college, in high school, and so on, drifting back to childhood. It's a wonderful, gradual unfolding of the characters, which proceeds organically, constantly offering new depth about each even as the story advances.

Tengo, while not a repeat of any earlier Murakami protagonist, does fit comfortably into the Murakami mold: like the "heroes" of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase, etc., Tengo is a fairly passive individual. At least he has a job, but it's something far beneath his abilities: even though he was a math prodigy in school, and has a passion for writing novels, he contents himself with teaching high-schoolers in a cram school. It isn't much work, and he seems content to do something simple that doesn't require much effort from him. Like those other passive heroes, amazing stuff tends to fall into his lap without any initiative from him. He has a steady stream of attractive young women who wish to be with him, but is content with a long-running affair with an older married woman. The main action in the novel kicks off when he is approached by his editor, who persuades him into a scheme to rewrite a novella submitted by a high-school girl. Much like Toru's search for a missing cat ends up taking away his wife and everything else in his life, Tengo's ghost-writing jaunt will irrevocably remove key pillars from his life and force him into another world.

Boy oh boy... Murakami sure is amazing at crafting three-dimensional characters. At one point Tengo's father describes Tengo as a "vacuum", which is a beautiful phrase, but totally contrary to how I experienced him. Tengo is a large, solid, gentle man, not physically attractive, but who radiates solidity and trustworthiness. He has a good heart, and a strong sense of justice, though they inform his life quietly. Tengo has only rarely asserted himself, and then only in reaction to some external stimulus, though we (and perhaps even he) can't directly draw a line between the two: holding hands with a pretty young girl in the fifth grade gives him the courage to tell his father that he hates accompanying him on his collection route; being persuaded to ghost-write one book, he becomes able to start writing his own book; a visit from a dislikeable and sinister man gives him courage to resist his offer. Tengo has many conflictions - he has never reconciled with his father, and has been unwilling to search for his missing mother or a woman who means much to him - and while he can keep living his normal life without resolving them, they continually percolate below the surface, surprising even him when they bubble up.

The other protagonist, Aomame, feels like a wholly original Murakami character. I guess she has a little of the drive of Crow from Kafka on the Shore, but she is far more self-assured. Like Tengo, she currently takes direction for her assignments, but you get the impression that she would get things done even without the nudges... she's just been lucky to find some kindred spirits who can supply her with useful missions.

I'm fighting the urge to say just what those missions are... I think we find out in the second one of her chapters, so it should hardly count as a mini spoiler, but it was surprising enough that I'd like to leave it unstated for now. In any case, it isn't totally essential for describing her character.

Like Tengo, Aomame is a fully-realized character. At first she seems like she might be a kind of action-movie heroine, and at one point near the end of the second volume she self-consciously apes Faye Dunaway from the (original) Thomas Crown Affair. That isn't what she's really about, though... this is kind of a weird analogy, but she's a little bit like a marine, someone who spends hundreds of days preparing their minds and bodies before a single day of playing with the highest stakes imaginable. We learn a lot about her perfectly toned body, her workout regime (she is an instructor at a health club), and her physical attributes; this isn't just to communicate her attractiveness, although it certainly does so, but also so we can eventually realize that her drive for self-reliance and self-improvement goes all the way down. From her childhood, she has focused on perfecting herself as much as she can, and all the ways she takes care of herself help her ultimate mission of protecting those who are close to her.

Speaking of her body... it's been long enough since I've read Murakami's novels that I had almost forgotten how freaky his sex scenes could be. Well, consider myself reminded! I don't know how one can, or should, rate these things, but this is pretty high up there with what I remember from his other books... the same discomforting scenes of almost-certainly-incest, rape, wildly inappropriate age pairings, and so on. It doesn't really diminish my overall appreciation of the book, but does make me shake my head and wonder if Japanese mores are really that different, or if Murakami comes across as that shocking in the original books.

As I noted above, I had been particularly interested during the run-up to 1Q84's release in reading about the translation efforts. This proved to be oddly fortuitous, since much of the early/middle portion of 1Q84 deals with the publishing process involved in printing a rough manuscript to market. I've experienced a form of this in the technical books that I've worked on, and it was wonderful to see Murakami kind of explore that process in the literary world. Like with translation, there are multiple characters at play: the raw inspiration and creative vision from an author; the eye for quality and the ear attuned to a new voice that a reviewer contributes; the technical skills and writing prowess of an editor/writer; the political and sales work done by a proper editor. In the context of this book, it's meant to be a slightly shameful thing that Fuka-Eri's name alone appears on the front of Air Chrysalis; but really, any book, even one as magnificent as 1Q84, is improved by the work done by reviewers, editors, copy-editors, and the many other people who work behind the scenes to bring the book to market. Heh... to borrow and mis-use Murakami's excellent metaphor, it's a little like a cocoon: the author creates life, and the author alone can make the new thing, but that new life may initially be weak and unprepared for the harsh world outside. The publishing company builds a cocoon around it, sheltering it, and giving it time to strengthen and grow. Then, once it is ready, and no longer needs the cocoon, it sheds it, and flies off into the world. By the time it reaches our hands in the bookstore, all that we see is the butterfly, the beautiful thing created by the author, but it could never have arrived if not for the care and shelter of the cocoon, built by the editor and no longer needed.

1Q84 has a LOT of GREAT analogies for writing, fiction, and the creative process. Many of these were collected into "Town of Cats," a wonderful short story that ran in The New Yorker a few months back. Town of Cats collects several sections that were scattered throughout the first few hundred pages of 1Q84, all from Tengo's chapters. We learn about Tengo's earliest childhood memory, of his mother with another man; his distressing Sundays collecting fees for the NHK and his estrangement from his father; and, in the core of the story, Tengo's trip on a train ride up to his father's nursing home, where he reads him a (fictional?) German story called "Town of Cats," and gently tries to get answers to some of the questions he's had all his life. The story-within-a-story is powerful, and simultaneously seems like a great Murakami story and like an authentic northern-European legend: mysterious, portentous, both direct and strange. The episode ends on an incredible dialog between Tengo and his father; Tengo's questions receive answers that don't seem to line up at all (such as queries about his biological father being answered with a complaint about how people don't appreciate the importance of subscription fees - "Radio waves don’t come falling out of the sky for free like rain or snow"). For much of the conversation, his father seems totally out of touch, and just plain wrong about the things he does say. But, in the end, he utters words that, I think, may be the best, most concise description I've seen yet for Murakami's writing. "If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation." I think that just perfectly captures what Murakami tries to do, and why he's so effective. People who complain about how his stories lack resolution, or how he doesn't make sense or doesn't explain his plots, are kind of missing the point. Murakami is operating one level higher than that of plot, of story, of logic. When I'm reading one of his novels, I feel like it takes my entire mind, as a whole, moving together, to grok what he's saying. It ends up being just as much about feeling, and experiencing, and KNOWING, as it is about explaining. An explanation would cheapen and diminish the outcome, forcing a big and complicated world to fit into a narrow box that happens to accommodate a bulleted list of action points. Murakami creates these big, great structures, and then floats them up for us to look at and ponder. In some ways, I think that approaching his novels is more like appreciating a fine painting than like reading Hemingway.

MEGA SPOILERS

Boy, the Little People sure are creepy, aren't they? I loved the slow reveal that Murakami used on this. Actually, the whole way he used Air Chrysalis in general was terrific. It's introduced very early on, but at first we get only occasional nuggets of information about its contents. It isn't until close to the end of the second volume, when Aomame finally reads it, that we finally get a full start-to-finish understanding of the story. In between, of course, we're able to piece much of it together, between the little we learn from Fuka-Eri's biography, the elements that Tengo inserted during his revision, and a few brief horrifying incidents like the Little People's invasion of the safehouse.

In some ways, it seems like the Little People are analogs to ancient European folklore about fairies; they aren't necessarily evil, but they certainly aren't good either, and they are so different and so powerful that it's wise to be wary of them. Of course, fairies/faeries have been so diluted by hundreds of years of infantilization that, even if Murakami was European, he would have been wise to create something new to convey that sort of dread, as he has done here. I keep harping on this, but what I love about Murakami is the combination of his incredibly clear prose and his incredibly opaque meaning. Once we do see the Little People, both in Air Chrysalis and walking through the ten-year-old victim's mouth, we see them very clearly: we know that they are a few inches tall at first, that they can change their size but max out at about a meter tall, that they build cocoons in the middle of the air by pulling white bits of fluff out of the space around them. All perfectly straightforward, and simultaneously incomprehensible.

Other than the Little People, I think the two most chilling scenes in the book for me were scenes involving the second moon. Not the part where Aomame first notices the second moon - that was a bit odd, and fanciful, but you don't really know what significance to attach to it, other than a confirmation that she seems to be operating on a different timeline from our own. Rather, I first got shivers in the scene where Tengo describes (I believe it's to his editor Komatsu, or possibly to his girlfriend) how you can tell the world of Air Chrysalis apart from our "real" world: the Air Chrysalis world has a second moon in the sky. That's the point where I realized that Aomame had become a character in a novel, instead of a person in the world. That's creepy enough, but what's worse is that, by that point, we've figured out the connection between Aomame and Tengo. We know that these two people love each other, that they've wasted the last two thirds of their lives apart from one another, and we badly want them to get back together. And now... we know that one of them is, in a sense, no longer "real."

(The way Murakami plays with the second moon in Aomame's world, incidentally, is great. We sense a significant disconnect between Aomame and the people around her, since she notices the second moon and nobody else does. However, we can never be completely sure just what the other people perceive. Does everyone else see one moon while she sees two? If so, that would make her seem a bit more like a crazy person, seeing something that isn't there. Or, does everyone else see two moons, but think that they have always seen two moons and so it isn't worth commenting on? If so, that would make it seem more like Aomame has entered an alternate world.  The book treats this very believably, since it's the sort of question that could be cleared up quickly with a single question, but the consequences of ASKING that question are so dire that Aomame doesn't dare do it. I do suppose that she might have tried something else, like checking a star atlas out of the library while she was looking up old newspaper articles, but I'll gladly let that slide. Ultimately, of course, we learn that the truth is somewhere in the middle - I think that Fuka-Eri may be the one who says that only certain people are able to see the second moon. Naturally, this isn't completely explained, but given the logic of the story I presume that the people who can see this are Perceivers, Receivers, and those directly affected by a Receiver. Oh, and that proved to be an unexpected perk of Murakami setting the novel in 1984 - it's kind of refreshing to go back to a world before the Internet, when people's questions couldn't realistically be immediately answered on their mobile phones. I like that Aomame needed to go to the library to find old news stories, and that her policewoman friend needed to contact the appropriate people in other departments in order to find out about potential crimes.)

The second, and bigger, shock comes near the very end of the second volume, when Tengo rests by the slide in the playground, looks into the sky, and then sees the second moon for himself. This is, of course, a huge jolt. How can an author become a character in his own novel? This forced me to re-evaluate my understanding of 1Q84 (the world, not the book). Well, more accurately, I guess it made me realize that 1Q84 is a world, and not a book. I had thought that Aomame was "just" a character, but no, she's really a person, and so is Tengo as well. The act of creativity started by Fuka-Eri and brought to fruition by Tengo, has become that thing that I so often proclaim to like, "a fully-realized world." Tengo's role has now become inverted, moving from the subject of the story to become its object. He has power in this world - since he helped create it, he's safe from the Little People - but he's also trapped in it, just as thoroughly as Aomame. Hmmm... I wonder if that might somehow be tied to the "purification" ritual that Fuka-Eri insists they perform? What was the importance of "going to the Town of Cats"? Was it his meeting with his father, or was it his absorption into another work of fiction? If the former, then the danger might have been that Tengo was leaving the world of fiction he had created for the "real" world, and so slipping out of the realm he controlled, and into a place which the Little People could penetrate and harm. In that case, the importance of the ritual might have been to bind Tengo's memory with Aomame, who is now in 1Q84 with him, and so keep him from the real world. Or, if the latter, then the problem might have been that Tengo is bringing another work of fiction into 1Q84, a powerful one that affects him, but one that he did not create and does not control. If so, that could have caused the dissonance (thunder and lightning) that he experienced, and by weakening his authorial privilege, he might have made himself vulnerable. In that case, the purification ritual's importance might have been more to distract him from the father-oriented concerns of A Town of Cats, and return his attention to the female-oriented concerns of Air Chrysalis.

I'm sure I'm way off-base on those ideas... but hey, I'm an English Lit major, and I do love my literary theories!

END SPOILERS

There's lots of other great stuff in this book... oh, even if you haven't picked it up yet, you should totally check out the wonderful Spotify playlist that Knopf put together for the book. It has a bunch of the many, many pieces of music referenced in this book. The list is long, and still isn't exhaustive - for example, there are quite a few more Rolling Stones songs mentioned in the book, including some more purely bluesy ones. As with Murakami's other books, the music is far from just background or scenery. At the least, it conveys important insight into characters' personalities; at most, though, it can powerfully drive the story. The single most important piece of music is "Sinfonietta" by Janacek, which plays a prominent role in the very first chapter, and returns and repeats throughout the remainder of the book as its significance amplifies. I'm feeling more regretful than usual about my lack of classical music knowledge, but this is inspiring me to rectify that situation... at least where central European composers are concerned.

Anyways! I must wrap up this post quickly so I can return to Book Three. I'll weigh in again on the entire novel after I've finished it. Right now, though, I'm pleased to report something that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to say: it was worth the wait.