Books and Arts; Book Review; New fiction from Japan;
文艺；书评；来自日本的新小说；
Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side;
嗨，去野外散个步吧；
A black cat, two moons and a host of nocturnal little people populate Haruki Murakami's new novel. But has he become more conventional?
在村上春树的新书里，他将一只黑猫、两轮月亮以及一群夜晚小小人拟人化。但他是否变得更保守点了呢？

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.
村上春树的新书《1Q84》书名的灵感来自于对乔治·奥威尔（ George Orwell）《1984》一书的借鉴（他把“9”改成了“Q"，而在日语里，“9”的发音与Q谐音）。此外，值得注意的是，书里故事发生的时间也是1984年最后的9个月。因此，如果错误地认为这位日本后现代魔幻大师花了近1000页的笔墨，只为描写一个情侣在野外做爱，并由于树上装有所有人都能听到的窃听器而不敢发出丝毫声音的反乌托邦世界，这就错了。但是村上春树在这里的主要影响并不像奥威尔或是菲利普·普尔曼（Philip Pullman）一样，他的《1Q84》一书与其说是通往另一个世界的阶梯，还不如说是完全逃向一个全新的世界。

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.
当身材纤瘦、两个乳房不对称的女主角青豆（Aomame，其意为“绿色的豆子”）坐在一辆出租车里，在堵得水泄不通的东京高速公路上蹒跚前行时，车里广播放着亚纳切克（Aomame）的小交响曲，此时此刻，故事开始了。出租车司机告诉青豆说她可以通过走一条附近出口的紧急通道来绕开堵车，不过，他警告说如果她这么做了，事情将会不一样了。但当青豆注意到警察们的左轮手枪变成了笨重半自动手枪时，才意识到自己进入了一个平行宇宙。

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 Tengo is an unpublished novelist who keeps to himself, working as a private maths tutor in a prep school.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.
这一引人入胜的开头保证了读者会为青豆而倾倒，这迫使村上春树得花更大的力气去塑造他的另一个人物——天吾（Tengo），在书里，天吾的故事与青豆的故事平行进行。天吾在一所补习学校里担任数学老师，他是个孤僻的业余写手，但他的小说从没发表过。天吾的父亲是NHK公司负责上门收费的收款员，周日的时候会拉着儿子跟他一起到各家各户去收电视有线费。天吾挚爱的母亲在他很小的时候就去世了，而他最早的回忆则是听着一个不是他父亲的男人在吮吸他母亲的乳房。随着小说情节的进展，天吾原本单薄的形象逐渐丰满起来，其中有一大段他的形象特别突出，这一段描写了他去养老院探望年老的父亲，并试图与父亲谈论过去。

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.
当天吾的朋友——性子暴躁的编辑小松（Komatsu）劝服他去修改少女深田绘里子（Eriko Fukada）（文中一直叫做深绘里）小说的初稿时，天吾的生活发生了变化。深绘里这部自传体的小说描写了自己生长的村庄公社被转变成了一个邪恶的新兴宗教团，充满勾心斗角和虐待儿童。小松认为如果小说风格能得到很好修改的话，使其拿下一座文学奖，那就足以让它成为畅销书了。青豆，人们原来也许以为她是一个不顾自己还穿着丝袜和褐色佐丹高跟鞋摇摇晃晃地翻过高空中的公路的女子，事实上却是一个野心勃勃的狐狸精，一个迷人而强势的女权主义者，一个妄图替天行道者，最喜欢每天出去干净利落地杀人，然后晚上来场疯狂的通宵性爱，男女不限。青豆实际上是个职业杀手，精于无声无息地除掉那些虐待妻子或侵犯儿童的男人，简直就是史迪克·拉尔森（Stieg Larsson）笔下丽丝贝·莎兰德（Lisbeth Salander）的日本漫画版。

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.

早在两位主角在这个反乌托邦世界里相遇之前，青豆和天吾这两条平行的故事线就开始交织在一起了。他们都看见了一只黑猫和两轮月亮（一轮形状正常，散发着光芒，另一轮却形状诡异，而且是苔藓一般的颜色）；他们也都知道小小人：那些小小人会不时从睡着的小孩口中爬出来，消失在床底下。 两位主角是校友，而且，他们在十岁的时候还有过一次牵手。想要重新拾回那个瞬间的渴望无法满足，渗入了他们两人的生活，而全书充斥着他们最终能在一起吗这个问题。

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.
这里有个关于“1Q84”的谜题。村上春树因一系列超现实主义的短文和小小说而被誉为日本最伟大的文学大师，这些文章包括1985年出版的《世界尽头与冷酷仙境》以及1987年出版的《挪威的森林》等。他早期的作品集中于描写郁闷的游魂般的男人的个人幻想，充斥各种西方音乐和文学的参考资料。相比之下，《1Q84》篇幅要长得多，但也保守得多。

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.
和两位均因创造性而闻名（但他们现在的作品更加注重阴谋）的两位美国作家乔纳森·弗兰岑（Jonathan Franzen）和杰弗里·尤金尼德斯（Jeffrey Eugenides）一样，村上春树似乎也有意描写男女之间的爱情故事。弗兰兹的新书怀疑已婚的主角们是否还会在一起；尤金尼德斯则抛出了女主角会跟两位主要男主角中的哪位在一起（如果她要跟一个人在一起的话）的问题。现在，轮到村上春树来决定男女主角之间的关系了，这显然是最近的流行趋势。2009年当《1Q84》的前两卷在日本出版时，几周之内就卖出了100多万本；几个月之后，第三卷也卖出了同样数目。追求原创性绝非易事，但是就如弗兰兹和尤金尼德斯一样，村上春树的新方向为他带来了成千上万的新读者。 这是件好事。