Books and Arts; Book Review; New fiction from Japan;

Haruki Murakami filches from George Orwell's “Nineteen Eighty-Four” for the title of his new novel, “1Q84”, making a play on kyu, the Japanese word for nine, by transposing the letter “Q” for the number “9”. Significantly, the action also takes place over the last nine months of 1984. But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Japan's magical postmodernist has spent nearly 1,000 pages writing about a dystopian world where couples make love in an ash glade, hardly daring to speak because of the all-listening microphones in the trees. Mr Murakami's main influence here is not so much Orwell as Philip Pullman; his “1Q84” less a stairway to another world than a heave-ho into a whole new universe.

Sitting in a taxi on the gridlocked elevated Metropolitan Expressway in Tokyo, Aomame, the skinny heroine with asymmetric breasts (her name means “green peas”), is catapulted into action when she hears Janacek's “Sinfonietta” on the radio. Her cabbie tells her she can beat the traffic by hopping out of the car and down an emergency staircase at the next exit. He warns her that things will not be the same. But it is only when Aomame notices that the policemen have swapped their holstered revolvers for bulky semi-automatic weapons that she realises she has entered a parallel universe.

This gripping beginning ensures the reader falls for Aomame, forcing Mr Murakami to work extra hard on her counterpart, Tengo, who appears in alternate chapters in the book. Tengo is an unpublished novelist who keeps to himself, working as a private maths tutor in a prep school. His father was a debt-collector who rounded up licence fees for the NHK television network, dragging his son along with him on Sundays as he called on households door-to-door. Tengo's beloved mother died when he was very young, and the boy's earliest memory is of hearing his mother having her breasts sucked by a man who was not his father. Tengo's flat-pack character fills out as the book evolves, in particular in a long passage when he visits his aged father in his nursing home and tries to talk to him about the past.

Tengo's life changes when a friend, a grumpy editor named Komatsu, persuades him to clean up a raw manuscript by a teenage girl, Eriko Fukada, called Fuka-Eri throughout. Komatsu believes that the girl's autobiographical story, about being raised on a rural commune that changes into a sinister cult involved in mind games and child abuse, has all the makings of a bestseller if its style can be improved enough so that it wins a literary prize. Aomame, as might be expected from a woman who shimmies down from an overhead expressway without much concern for her stockings or her chestnut- coloured Charles Jourdan heels, turns out to be a minx on the make, a charming, ball-breaking, feminist do-gooder who likes nothing better than rounding off a day's killing with an all-night bout of bisexual sex. Aomame is really a hired gun, who specialises in quietly offing wife-beaters and child rapists, a manga version of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander.

Aomame's and Tengo's parallel stories begin to rub against one another long before the characters do. They both see a black cat and two moons (one shiny and normal, the other misshapen and moss-coloured); and both know about the little people who emerge periodically from the mouth of a sleeping child and disappear under the child's bed. The two heroes were once at school together and even, briefly, held hands at the age of ten. An unresolved longing to recapture that moment permeates both their lives, and the will-they-won't-they question overshadows the whole book.

Herein lies the conundrum of “1Q84”. Mr Murakami's reputation as Japan's greatest literary surrealist is based on a series of short stories and novels, such as “Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”, which came out in 1985, and “Norwegian Wood” two years later. His early works were intensely personal fantasies involving unhappy, virtually disembodied men and suffused with references to Western music and literature. “1Q84” is much longer, but also far more conventional.

Like two American writers, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, both known for their fizzy inventiveness but whose recent work is more plot-driven, Mr Murakami seems to have made a conscious move towards romantic narrative. Mr Franzen's latest book asks whether the married protagonists will stay together; Mr Eugenides's which of the two main heroes will his heroine end up with (if any). It is Mr Murakami's turn, now, to cut in on the boy-girl gavotte. This has certainly proved a popular move. When the first two volumes of “1Q84” were published in Japanese in 2009, more than 1m copies were sold in just a few weeks; the third volume followed to similar acclaim a few months later. Keeping up originality can be hard work. But Mr Murakami's new direction, like that of Mr Franzen and Mr Eugenides, is bringing him thousands of fresh readers. And that is a good thing.