A fun discovery regarding Little People and memory in Murakami’s 1Q84

This will be a short article, just something I noticed and when I went to look into the matter further, I couldn’t find much written about it. As such, I thought I’d pop it up on the interwebs for anyone else who may come across it in the future and could gleam as much joy from it as I did.

For those of you who have read Haruki Murakami’s sprawling 18Q4, you undoubtedly remember the haunting “Little People” who cross over between worlds and act almost as a boogeyman for the lurking dread that book delivers on such a poignant level.

When I read the book, one of my favorite things about it was the feeling that everything stood for something, and that Murakami was saying far more than I could grasp. It’s a great trick that only some authors can pull off. It’s especially difficult given that when it goes awry it feels so uncomfortable and forced. But — much like the “Little People” of 1Q84 weaving their air chrysalis— Murakami threads this needle perfectly and keeps the reader engaged while wanting more.

As soon as I finished reading 1Q84, I attempted to find some in-depth critical analysis of the book, but found none that opened the Pandora’s box of the just-below-the-surface symbolism that I was sure was there. Now, part of that may well be that those articles exist in Japan but have not been translated, but alas, I feel I may have stumbled over a little bit of uncovered depth on my own.

It came to me as I was reading Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation.

(Quick tangent: Department of Speculation is a book that served absolutely no purpose to me outside of this cool discovery… Sylvia Plath is my favorite author of all time, but the generation of mediocre sad people, who have no skill beyond their sadness, like Offill, Ben Lerner, and even Jonathan Franzen, I do somewhat blame on Plath in a twisted way. She was so incredible at writing about the emotion of sadness that it created a generation of people who thought they could do it but fail so miserably. That being said, Plath likely also inspired the likes of Sally Rooney and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — two outstanding “sad writers” who do have something to say just beyond being sad. Anyway, back to the matter at hand.)

The book begins with the following:

Antelopes have 10X vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.

It was still months before we’d tell each other all our stories. And even then some seemed too small to bother with. So why do they come back to me now? Now, when I’m so weary of all of it.

Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart. Little people, Edison called them. Entities. He had a theory about where they came from and that theory was outer space.

I have bolded the part most relevant to our discussion here. Any one who has read Murakami knows that his writing is filled to the brim with references of all sorts. Many of these references are to Western society, and many of them to the brightest minds in Western society.

With that in mind, there’s simply no way this is a coincidence. The Little People of 1Q84 have to be representative of memory. They come from a far-off world, and they are perpetually weaving air chrysalises, an image that called to mind dreams/memories even on a first read.

This is such an interesting wrinkle to think about when reading 1Q84. A central part of the book centers around Tengo’s memories as a child. One memory is of his mother having her breasts sucked by a man who was not Tengo’s father. The other is a memory centered around an interaction with a girl from his class with whom he had an almost spiritual connection in just a brief hand holding.

The girl grows up to be Aomame, of course, and the idea that these air chrysalises are being built to represent those formative memories in our life that either hold us back (possibly from connecting with his father at a deeper level) or drive us forward (towards one day finding and re-connecting with Aomame) is one of the coolest concepts I can remember reading in any book.

I loved 1Q84 when I read it last fall, and I love it even more having made this potential discovery. But really, most of all, I just love the idea that these hidden concepts can be buried in the books we love, just waiting for us to find the right key to unlock them and appreciate them for all the beauty they hold within.