Stranger on Earth

The theme of the will to power is perhaps most succinctly expressed in “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” a crime thriller situated in 1970’s California involving Luisa Rey, a strong-headed journalist, and her attempt to expose a dodgy nuclear power plant. Seaboard Corporation is in itself a miniature version of the dominance hierarchy witnessed in humankind, where the strong and the crafty dispatch the weak to secure their future. The henchmen of Seaboard Corporation double-cross one another to keep the secret of the power plant safe. One of them, Alberto Grimaldi, ponders on the meaning of power: “Power.” What do we mean? “The ability to determine another man’s luck” … the will to power. This is the enigma at the core of the various destinies of men. What drives some to accrue power where the majority of their compatriots lose, mishandle, or eschew power? Is it addiction? Wealth? Survival? Natural selection? I propose these are all pretexts and results, not the root ca...

When a totalitarian regime or a theocracy imposes its narrow rules on the written word, dramatic things can happen to a people’s history. This point is touched upon early on – in Book 1, Chapter 20 – by Tengo when he is introducing Orwell’s 1984 to a clueless Fuka-Eri. He tells her how in the novel the regime is constantly rewriting history, distorting it to the extent where no-one can remember the actual past. He tells her that “robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves,” and labels the act a “crime.” “Our memory,” he says, “is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves” (257). Simply put, individuals who live under a totalitarian regime will always have to suppress their true selves – if they do not want to suffer punishment. W...

Here the reader arrives at the junction where Murakami’s work crosses from the metaphysical to the real and tangible, for in the single-moon world we have also had the misfortune of witnessing writers persecuted for their ability to tell a different “truth.” Salman Rushdie’s fate after the publication of The Satanic Verse is well-documented and needs no reiteration. A more discriminate look at literary history gives us several more voices hushed by the Authorities: Turkish author and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk was arrested for comments about the massacres of Armenians in the First World War. Nigerian protest author Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried by a military tribunal and hanged. Yu Jie, author of China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao , a controversial book that cast a critical light on the premier, landed in hot water with the Chinese authorities, and had to emigrate to the USA for his own safety. His close friend and Nobel Prize-winning literary critic Liu Xiaobo called for politic...

Long before the 1000-page 1Q84 draws to a close with the saccharine reunion of its two main protagonists, Tengo and Aomame, Murakami broaches the subject of religious orthodoxy and its effects on Literature – respectively represented by Sakigake (a secretive religious organisation legally sanctioned by the Japanese government) and the ghost-written fantasy novella Air Chrysalis . Although the premise of this subject was never fully explored (perhaps it was never Murakami’s intention), due to the novel’s shift to Tengo and Aomame’s love story in Book 3, enough of it inhabits the unconventional world of 1Q84 to warrant an in-depth discussion. Sakigake is an exclusive religious community (not at all unlike Aum, the sect that launched the Tokyo gas attacks in 1995, which Murakami had extensively dealt with in the probing Underground ) that thrives on secrecy and the vague, mystical promise of salvation. We catch a glimpse of its interior through the descriptions of several charac...