• A bookstore at midnight. Click to enlarge.

The dog was winding around and through the legs of roughly a hundred people who had gathered at Elliott Bay to celebrate the midnight release of Haruki Murakami's new novel, 1Q84. They browsed the stacks, killing time. Some of them were on dates with people who did not appreciate hanging out in a bookstore at midnight. A few other folks were giddy; some of them had had a few drinks. Customers were frantically filling out trivia forms; the questions ranged from the simple ("The title 1Q84 just might be an allusion to the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by which writer?") to the difficult ("Which three stories in [Murakami's first short story collection] Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman were originally published in 1984?").

Finally, at midnight, the winners of the trivia contest were announced: Three people had tied for first prize, with eleven out of twenty correct answers each. One of the winners couldn't restrain herself; she issued a joyous yelp. They each won an autographed copy of 1Q84. (Murakami's signature looks sketchy, but somehow precise. The characters float above each other in loosely arranged constellations. Find photos of the signature and the night in a slideshow over here.) Seven more copies were raffled off, and then everyone formed a polite line and picked up their unsigned copies. Several people openly grumbled about the dust jacket of the book. As part of his striking design—the book really does look like an event, with a 2001-like stately buildup to the first few pages of text—Chip Kidd chose to make the dust jacket out of a tracing-paper-like material that crumpled easily and didn't want to hold the shape of the thick book. It will be hard to find mint first editions of 1Q84 in a few years. (I wonder how those complainers will feel when they get home and find the glaring typo on the very first page of the book. That's a disappointing stumble at the beginning of a long journey.) Elliott Bay sold about ninety copies. The store was almost empty by quarter after midnight. Murakami's fiction has been known to overtly affect the dreams of his readers; lots of people were going to be sharing the same psychic space that night. Which brings me to my next point:

Murakami's novels fit into certain types. His last most recent big novel*, Kafka on the Shore, with its demonic Colonel Sanderses, leaned more into the crazy-ass-shit-happens-all-the-time category, like Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. And he does those kinds of books well, but it's novels like Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, those stories that start out normally and then slowly build into a tense, bizarre world that barely resembles our own, where Murakami really shines. 1Q84, I think, is like that.

It begins with two narratives. Aomame (her name means "green peas") is stuck in a cab in standstill traffic, late for an important meeting. The cab driver suggests that she uses the highway's emergency stairs to get down to the street so she can catch the subway to her meeting. Just before she leaves the car, the cab driver warns her that she is about to do something out of the ordinary:

"And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality."

It's a warning straight out of a fairy tale. At first, everything seems normal. Aomame is a bit more confident for having taken the somewhat bold step of abandoning traffic and finding an alternate route to her meeting. But once we learn where she's going, things start to go cattywampus. Aomame is a strong female lead with an interesting problem and several fascinating obsessions. (She believes, for example, that the central point of self-defense is always kicking the man in the testicles. She gets upset when men in her self-defense class won't allow her to kick them in the balls.) She seems lost, but cheerfully so. Sometimes Murakami's lead characters are voids who we are invited to write ourselves into; Aomame is more like a close (but emotionally distant) friend.

Meanwhile (or is it meanwhile? There's no direct connection as of yet) a man named Tengo is judging a fiction competition. His boss suggests to him that he take one of the vaguely promising entries into the competition, rewrite it, and submit it to the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. Tengo meets the author—a teenage girl who has a traumatic past involving a cult—and begins to rewrite the story. Murakami's weirdness is just at the edges of this narrative; the reader has to wonder if he's going to use the cult backstory to explore his well-documented obsession with the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks. Something that readers will appreciate in this narrative is that Murakami seems to be folding an essay about the craft of writing into the story:

The exact same text was subtly different to read when viewed on the printed pages rather than on the word processor's screen. The feel of the words he chose would change depending on whether he was writing them on paper in pencil or typing them on the keyboard. It was imperative to do both...Each sentence possessed the proper weight, which gave the whole thing a natural rhythm.

(One of the chapters is even named, self-consciously, "Things That Most Readers Have Never Seen Before.")

It's a lot of fun, so far. These two narratives are different enough that they don't seep into each other in a confusing way, and they're both exciting enough to keep an exhausted reader wide awake into the early morning. Murakami knows exactly how much time to spend with each protagonist before switching back to the other story, giving us just enough story to pique our interest for the next chapter. This is the liveliest Murakami's felt in years, maybe since Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I can't wait to lose sleep over this book tonight.

* Thanks to Slog tipper Matthew for reminding me that After Dark exists. It's pretty forgettable, so far as Murakami books go.