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Wednesday
Last week, in an attempt to better understand Trump cultism, I examined what Haruki Murakami has to say about cults in 1Q84. There we see a 1960s commune, formed by disaffected students and intellectuals, turn tyrannical and become associated with toxic masculinity and violence against women. In my post I noted that there were aspects of the book that I still wanted to work out, and today’s essay does that.
This means that I will focus more on literary interpretation than on literary application so that this essay may most appeal to those who have read the novel and want to understand it better. But that being said, I must point out that the novel is very relevant to today as we witness a rise in toxic masculinity. (Trump owes some of his 2024 election to the “bro vote.”) Murakami, as I see it, has given us a mythical fable that envisions a healthier relationship between men and women.
This vision may be what so captivates me about the work, which I first encountered through a New Yorker excerpt. “The City of Cats” chapter so captured my imagination that I knew I had to read the entire novel. I entered the Avid Reader bookstore in Davis, California (where my granddaughter Esmé had just been born) and said I was looking for a novel by a Japanese novelist with numbers and letters in the title. They knew exactly what I wanted and, after I purchased it, I lost myself completely in its 1100 pages. Then I went back to the bookstore and bought every other Murakami novel they had. It is unlike me to become so instantly obsessed but such was the case here.
I loved the heroine and hero, who are given alternating chapters until the very end. Aomame and Tengo meet as 10-year-old children, have a brief but meaningful encounter, and then don’t see each other for the next 20 years. Aomame grows up to be a fitness instructor, Tengo a math tutor and aspiring writer. Then the story turns magical realist as they find themselves part of a world that both is and is not our own (which is a pretty good description of magical realism).
The magic involves tiny people who emerge from dead mouths and weave “air chrysalises” out of invisible threads plucked from the air. The cult’s leader can channel these voices but, after he dies and the voices are cut off, the protagonists become targets of the cult (more on this in a moment). In the end (spoiler alert) Aomame and Tengo find each other and escape this alternate world via the portal through which Aomame initially entered.
The most confusing part of the book is the “Little People,” who find their way into our world through an act of cruelty: teenage Fukuda, the daughter of the cult leader, is punished after her negligence results in the death of one of the commune’s goats. Her sentence is to be locked up in solitary confinement with the animal for ten days. She is fed daily, of course, but is given minimal protection against the cold.
It is during the course of this confinement that the small men emerge from the goat’s mouth. Fukuda watches them work and, at the end of her sentence, peeks into the chrysalis, which proves to contain a version of herself. She later learns that this shadow figure is her “dohta” while she, the original, is a “maza.”
Rather than return to the commune and to her parents, she runs away, ending up with a former friend of her father’s. She tells him and his daughter her story, which they write down and submit to a writing competition for new writers. Tengo is brought in to secretly copy edit the novel (which violates the rules of the competition) and is so taken with it that he turns out a masterful work. His collaboration with Fuka-Eri (her author’s name) functions as a portal into this other world, which he understandably thinks is fantastical rather than real.
The story makes heavy use of Jungian symbolism, and the Little People are to be read through that lens. They and the dohta that they create can be seen as our shadow side. As Jung, following Freud, saw it, the shadow is that part of ourselves that we dislike and fear and that we push into the unconscious, where it becomes toxic. In what Freud called “the return of the repressed,” the shadow refuses to remain hidden but manifests itself in various ways, including through nightmares and pathological behavior. Murakami, in other words, has created a story where he can explore what he and his society are repressing.
What is being repressed is Japanese male violence, which Japan witnessed in full living color during the brutal invasion of Manchuria and China in the 1930s and the subsequent attack on British and American colonies in World War II. While, following its defeat, Japan committed itself to a peaceful course of action, it saw violence erupt in the 1968-69 student demonstrations, which in the novel lead to the formation of the commune/cult.
Violence also breaks out in domestic relationships, where seemingly respectable husbands and fathers batter women and children. I count at least ten instances of violence against women in the novel, two involving strangulation and two suicide. And then there is the cult leader, who rapes little girls whose parents hope that they will give birth of his heir. Instead, he destroys their ovaries.
The Little People are the figures for this violence. They initially seem harmless, given that they resemble the dwarfs in “Snow White,” but their size is deceptive. Sometimes it is small men who are most anxious about their manhood—unlike Tengo, who is large and gentle.
Pushback comes from two quarters. Tengo and Fuki-Era, by telling her story to the world, temporarily neutralize the Little People. It’s as though the joint authors are Jungian therapists, providing the world with literary understanding of how toxic masculinity works. And then there is Aomame, who becomes the nightmare of abusive men by insinuating herself into their lives and killing them.
We first meet Aomame on her way to one of the assassinations, dressed in a Junko Shimada suit and Charles Jourdan heels. In other words, she resembles a femme fatale from a 1940s film noir only, unlike such women, Murakami doesn’t let Aomame become an archetypal anima figure. Instead, he makes her a three-dimensional character.
What drives her is rage that her two best friends have died due to male violence. Though she doesn’t realize it, it’s as though she’s been called into the magical realist world of 1Q84 to redress an imbalance. We’re not told how many men she kills—she’s an expert at knowing just where to plant an icepick so that the deaths look like heart attacks—but her final job is to kill the cult leader. After all, doesn’t a rapist of little girls deserve to die?
Only the story then starts to get more complicated. As it turns out, the leader has not been raping his shrine maidens but rather their dohtas—which is to say, they are not actual girls by chrysalis replicas. Furthermore, he knows Aomame is coming to kill him but, because he is suffering from a debilitating illness, welcomes her icepick. We’re not entirely clear what has gone wrong with him but, as I read the character, he stands in for suffering Japanese men, whose toxic masculinity is ravaging them. We learn that this leader has actually assisted in his daughter Fuka-Eri’s escape, seeing her as an antibody to the Little People.
It’s as though Donald Trump, who revels in his power to grab women “by their pussies,” were to realize what an empty life he’s been leading and were to surreptitiously take measures to end his MAGA cult. We know, from his whining about “trophy wives” at Saturday’s West Point commencement speech, just how lonely and miserable he is.
Okay, we can dream about Trump seeing the light. But regardless of what the leader in the novel wants, his violent cult is not ready to disband. Desperate to hear the voices again, it attempts to track down Aomame for the killing of their leader and Tengo and Fuka-Eri for writing the book. At this point IQ84 becomes a noir detective novel, and we encounter the chain-smoking and slovenly P.I. that has been hired by the cult to track them down.
A deeper look into Aomame is in order here. Because of a harsh upbringing that involved her religious mother dragging her from house to house to proselytize, she has had to grow up tough, which is why she makes an effective assassin. She has watched her two best friends die and doesn’t want to be vulnerable. Yet she longs for a loving relationship with the boy who once came to her rescue in elementary school.
Tengo, meanwhile, also has had to escape a father who dragged him from door to door—in his case, to collect television and radio fees—and has, like Aomame, retreated into a lonely existence. He longs for the little girl who once unexpectedly squeezed his hand in a classroom.
There’s one scene involving a Tengo encounter with an air chrysalis that needs explaining. While attending the death bed of this father whom he has never loved, he encounters the gauzy wrapping and, looking into it, finds the dohta of 10-year-old Aomame. In other words, Aomame’s shadow side is a sweet little girl, which she has repressed in order to survive in the world.
The dohta enters into Tengo’s drama as well. For weeks after the encounter, Tengo stays close to his comatose father, less for his sake that hoping for a reappearance of the chyrsalis. In the end, however, he has to leave and return home—and only in doing so can he meet the actual Aomame. As I read the scene, only when he leaves his father and grows up to be his own man can he have a relationship, not with a fantasy of his childhood love, but with an actual grown woman.
So the novel evolves into a beautiful love story with wonderful gender balance: Tengo is a sensitive but manly man who learns to commit himself to his writing and to the relationship while Aomame is a forceful woman who learns to reconnect with her tender side and, in the end, her maternal side. That’s because, through the magical mediation of Fuka-Eri, she finds herself pregnant with Tengo’s baby. This conception occurs four months before they actually meet. Somehow, the death of the old leader has led to the possibility of a new kind of relationship between men and women. Their baby represents the future.
The cult is trying to get its hands on this baby—which would continue the old patterns of violence—while Aomame is determined to break free. Together she and Tengo find the portal through which she entered the world of 1Q84 and return to the Japan of 1984. Their new life will involve challenges, of course, but it will be built on a healthier foundation.
Many of us thought that the 1970s feminist movement was critical to building our own healthy foundation, liberating women and men alike from limiting gender expectations. Now the Trump administration is targeting professional women as it seeks to reverse these gains. Trump is channeling America’s Little People for his cult followers, and the result is mounting violence and threats of violence.
But don’t forget about Murakami’s vision of hope. The cult leader explains to Aomame before she helps him die that, while the violence of the Little People can be seen as a virus, as a virus it generates antibodies. The antibody in this instance is the literary collaboration between his daughter and Tengo. Fiction, in other words, will push back against forces that threaten to tear society apart. In the end, the final counter to Japan’s latent violence is Tengo’s and Aomame’s love for each other.
Put another way, in the face of the of the hatred and violence that we witness daily from Trump and his followers, we must never stop loving. Or as Matthew Arnold put it while gazing out at his society’s desolate and dreary prospects, “Ah, love, let us be true to one another.”
