1Q84 Chapter 1

Don't Let Appearances Fool You


Aomame (her name means "green peas"), thirty years old. She is in the back of a cab, on the Tokyo metropolitan expressway, stuck in traffic. Janacek's Sinfonietto is playing on the radio, a piece of music she recognizes. She is a student of history, always able to memorize and recall dates with ease. She wonders what Janacek would have thought of somebody listening to his music nearly sixty years later. At the time, no one in Czechoslovakia (where Janacek is from) knew what was about to happen re: WW2. Similarly, in Japan, in 1926, the emperor would die and with him, the era. No one could have known any of this.
The driver of the taxi doesn't think that Aomame will make her appointment, forty-five minutes hence. There must be an accident up ahead and it is having a horrible effect on the traffic. He says that if they were on the street, she could get out and take the subway, alas, they are on the expressway. But! There is a little-known maintenance stairway at the turnout just ahead that she could use to get down to street level and then find her way to a nearby subway station. Aomame takes his advice, pays for the fare thus far, and gets out of the cab. She surveys the surrounding traffic, but if anyone notices her, she either does not see, or doesn't care. She has protected herself since childhood by being inconspicuous, and although she is doing something out of the ordinary now, she is trying not to be noticed. But, the taxi driver warns her: doing something new and unplanned may change the circumstances and anything could be different afterwards. However, there is only one reality, so she shouldn't let appearances fool her. Aomame takes off her shoes and coat to climb over the low barrier blocking the stairway and climbs down.


There is a sea theme going on in this chapter. We'll see how this might continue to recur in Aomame chapters. Here are some examples:


"... she felt like a lonely castaway on the open sea."


"... fleet cab." This might actually be how a taxi is referred to within the company. Still, though.


"... aircraft carrier on a stormy sea."


"Her eyes had the cool, vigilant stare of a superior deck officer."


Not sure who Aomame is going to meet or what her business is. There is an allusion to a sharp object in her bag, though. And she protects herself by not being noticed. So she slips in under people's radar. Is she involved in some shady business?


Other notes:


"There's always only one reality."


"As she listened to the long recorded applause, it sounded less like
applause and more like an endless Martian sandstorm."
Awesome simile there. Murakami makes a lot of references to being on
water in this chapter, being on Mars is something different, or maybe riffing on
whether or not there is water, or life, on Mars.


Expanding my vocabulary:


Vicissitude
Regular change or succession from one thing to another, or one part of a cycle to the next; alternation;
mutual succession; interchange. (often plural) a change, especially in one's life or fortunes.


Paucity
Fewness in number; a small number.
Smallness in size or amount; meagerness.