"Down there" is that curious interiorised urban landscape where life has the atmosphere of an air-conditioned shopping mall or an all-night garage or a soundless television watched in a gym the place, not dissimilar from our own world, though vaguely and surreally dehumanised, in which Murakami's characters are always fated to dwell. But beware, he suggests, "things might look different to you down there". Her driver advises her that if she is to make the very important date for which she is late, she might use an emergency iron stair off the high carriageway that will take her down to ground level. She's listening to Janácek's Sinfonietta on the car's stereo and daydreaming about how that particular piece of music, written in 1926 in Czechoslovakia, represented the ultimate calm before the storm, a brief peaceful respite in central Europe that served to prove "the most important proposition in history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.'"Īomame too, has no idea what lies in store, but her looking-glass world is about to be revealed. Thirty-year old Aomame is grid-locked in a cab at the book's opening, on an elevated section of the Tokyo Expressway. The protagonists find their entrances, in different ways. The particular Barnum and Bailey world into which we and those characters have been cast is Murakami-land, and as always in his fiction it is a place where nothing is ever quite in tune. As the narrative develops in its improvisatory way, the quoted lyrics become a pointed kind of challenge both to them, and to the reader. The song runs in the heads of the two characters through whose stories much of the 1,000 pages of the two-volume "trilogy" (books one and two are one book) is told, in alternating chapters.
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