Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 and The Uncanny

Freud's theory of the Uncanny, or Unheimlich, is easiest described as a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar with an end product coming across a peculiar and somewhat indigestible. In our anthology’s sample of Freud’s “The Uncanny” we have the example, given by Jentsch, of the uncanny; “doubts whether an apparently inanimate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not infact be animate”. Here is where I would like to bring in Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84. In the novel, which is over 1,000 pages and therefore quite difficult to summarize, the reader is presented the concept of an air chrysalis. The air chrysalis is a cocoon of sorts, woven from strands plucked from the air by “little people”. The air chrysalis slowly become larger, it is almost like a womb. There is a scene in which the protagonist, Tengo, comes across an air chrysalis on his father’s hospital bed, in place of his father. When he peeks inside the form he sees a “freshly made” replica, of sorts, of the little girl Aomame he once knew as a child. Aomame is the second protagonist of the story, but she is an adult in the timeline of the novel. By seeing an unmoving “freshly made”, anachronistic version of Aomame, he questions the reality of it. She does not wake of move in this scene, we do not know if she is animate. We question the humanity of the very human looking form, this is uncanny.

                Although this novel, like most of Murakami’s work, is rife with instances of the uncanny, the second example I will give is that of the two moons over Tokyo. The two moons appear, for Aomame, when she descends the stairs from an elevated highway platform. This is the moment when Aomame enters 1Q84, having previously been residing in 1984. The uncanny is apparent even in the naming strategy here. The letter “Q”, in Japanese has a sound analogous to the sound of the Japanese number nine. By replacing the 9 in 1984 with something that looks different (unfamiliar), but sounds the same (familiar) Murakami has toyed with the uncanny in the mere title of his novel. But, going back to the two moons, the presence of the second moon is both unfamiliar, but familiar. The characters are continually checking for the presence of absence of this second moon throughout the novel and at times it’s uncanniness is a source of comfort.

                An additional instance of the Uncanny that is important to the differentiation between 1984 and 1Q84 in the novel is the police uniform and gun. The gun is especially important. Aomame remembers the officers always carrying revolvers, but in 1Q84 they all carry semi-automatic pistols. The difference between the two is beyond me, bit this subtle variation is very important to the story. There is a large element of the story, that I’m not going to touch on here, that revolves around an ideological cult and there was previously a fatal shootout that had resulted in the change in weapons carried by the Tokyo police officers. This shootout did not occur in 1984, but had in 1Q84. Aomame’s process of coming to terms with events and their repercussions that she had no memory of every occurring was an instance of the Uncanny. She was both familiar with the circumstances of the events, but unfamiliar with the events and their aftermath.

                Murakami’s magical realist works all have some element of the Uncanny in them. He is one of my favorite authors and although I wouldn’t recommend starting with such a monstrous novel as 1Q84, I definitely believe his works are required reading.