Murakami, who admires Studs Terkel’s interviews with working people about their lives, adopted the technique in his non-fiction book Underground (1997–98). It is present also in 1Q84. He details people’s food, clothes, apartments, habits, and thoughts with what would be boring exactitude but for his recurrent reminders that appearances cannot be trusted. Murakami is an assiduous reader in Japanese and English, and his occasional stories in the popular press about ordinary people, some of them on the edges of illegality, suggest a possible debt to Dickens. But in 1Q84 he prefers to acknowledge Shakespeare, Bach, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Jung, Kafka, Sibelius, Wittgenstein, and of course Orwell. The ‘memory hole’ in 1984 he reinvents here as a large incinerator used by an authoritarian cult to dispose of bodies.

Or does Murakami hope to be seen as Japan’s Proust? His heroine, Aomame, hiding away in a Tokyo apartment, reads all of À la recherche du temps perdu and has madeleines delivered. Brought up by Witnesses but now apostate, in times of need she still recites their version of the Lord’s Prayer. She wears Charles Jourdan and Junko Shimada, but only when she’s on a case. No classical music expert, she is moved by Sinfonietta, which Janáček wrote in 1926 to celebrate the liberation of Czechoslovakia (which turned out not to be as it seemed). Sinfonietta is the book’s theme-tune; there has been a rush on sales of the CDs in Japan. Murakami knows his Western music, and in pre-celebrity days he ran a jazz bar in Tokyo. His successful fifth novel, Norwegian Wood (1987), deploys that Beatles song, as does the eponymous 2010 movie. As his publisher’s website says, ‘the beat goes on’. Every so often, in 1Q84, a Little Person appears, who is the ‘keeper of the beat’, and perhaps as well, Murakami’s answer to 1984’s Big Brother.

Apart from Kazuo Ishiguro, who lives in England, Murakami is internationally the best known of contemporary Japanese writers. A marathon runner, he has lived in the United States and Europe. He visited Sydney during the 2000 Olympics and wrote an account, in Japanese, of his experiences. Many expect him soon to add the Nobel to his literary prizes. Perhaps it is this golden prospect which has led his publishers to mould three novels into the seriously ‘monumental’ 1Q84. When he spoke in Barcelona in mid-2011, Murakami showed he has the social conscience requisite for the prize. He called for writers to join a collective effort against the nuclear industry, accusing Japan at Fukushima of turning a nuclear weapon on itself. If accessibility is another factor for the Nobel, the Japan of the 1980s that he writes about in 1Q84 is eclectic, stylish, prosperous, and has the same traffic jams, binge-drinking, broken families, isolation, anomie, and religious cults,both home-grown and imported, as almost anywhere in the West. Both 1Q84 and Norwegian Wood begin with a young person’s suicide and, like much Western adolescent fiction, both novels involve dislocated individuals, isolated communes, and long – very long – quests for love. A Japanese academic friend of mine concludes from all this that Murakami owes his celebrity abroad to thinking and writing just like a foreigner, to such an extent that she worries about the reciprocal decline of a Japanese tradition in fiction.

I don’t agree. Thanks to the talents of Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel as translators, people outside Japan can read 1Q84 (with only an occasional lapse) as the thoroughly Japanese narrative it is. A Japan Times review recommends it as a guide to contemporary Japanese culture. Its challenge is not confined to the enigmatic text design: without being science fiction, it expects the reader to go along with preposterous events. It requires you to speculate about definitions of reality, the interpretation of dreams, and whether time is linear or cyclical. As Rubin says, reading Murakami changes your brain. Reading 1Q84, you enter the Japanese mind, with its concerns about privacy, restraint, secrecy, motivation, the seeming, the instinctive, and the unspoken. The sheer length and slow pace of 1Q84 makes you observe Murakami’s people as they confront situations that demand action, then hesitate, consider all the implications, do something different, and usually tell no one. His narrative structure, getting inside each main character in turn, as they slowly home in on one another, almost becomes tedious, but then he snaps his fingers and the tension suddenly rebuilds. It is like a Noh play in which a masked actor moves inchingly across the stage, stops, waits fixedly, and then turns to look the other way. The Japanese audience gasps: ‘I was waiting for that!’

Murakami evokes 1980s Japan in 1Q84 as painstakingly as he did the 1960s in Norwegian Wood. Computers are in their infancy, and people have just begun to use word processors and credit cards, they still take films to shops to be processed, and they have no mobile phones. In what seems to be a retro filmic gesture, they often stare into phone handsets that have gone dead. All Murakami’s people hate television, so we are spared that. But is he intentionally being so 1980s when he introduces almost every woman by her bra-size? And even though Aomame has locked herself away and is bored, what is the point of her frequent naked full-length mirror self-inspections? Let us hope that being shortlisted for The Literary Review’s 2010 bad sex award for comparing an ear and a vagina in 1Q84 will not rob Murakami of an eventual Nobel. Even though a tidy resolution, Agatha Christie-style, of all the mysteries wouldn’t work aesthetically for 1Q84, many loose ends remain. It is as if there is a fourth part to come, or another book, that will answer the question and then what? My guess is: Fukushima.