1Q84: Sinfonietta Metamoderna (2024)

Composer note
Behind Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra is the Friedrich Nietzsche novel of the same name, which explores, among other things, the idea of an “eternal recurrence.” A 21st-century understanding of this might look something like the multi-verse, a complex and overlapping vision of reality where multiple worlds become a metaphor for the strangeness of lived experience in our contemporary time.

In the novel 1Q84, novelist Haruki Murakami explores the possibility of multiple realities — worlds that split off one from the next because of minute decisions. As in Strauss’s tone poem, 1Q84: Sinfonietta Metamoderna loosely follows the novel’s structure, with thematic material connected to the characters and events of the story.

When the novel opens, it is April of 1984. On her way to her next hit, professional assassin and fitness instructor Aomame finds herself stuck in traffic on Tokyo’s Metropolitan Expressway 3. The radio is blasting Janáček’s Sinfonietta. So as not to be late, she exits the taxi and climbs down the emergency stairway. In so doing, she enters the world of 1Q84 — an alternate version of the world she knows, where the sky has two moons, and where the leader of a powerful cult is controlled by the Little People. She thinks often about a boy she once knew, Tengo.

Tengo, now 30 years old, is a cram school instructor and the ghostwriter for the highly successful novel Air Chrysalis — a story about a powerful cult under the control of supernatural beings called Little People who move about between worlds through the mouths of their victims. Tengo longs to reconnect with a girl whose hand he held briefly when he was a child.

Aomame is sent to kill the Leader of the cult. The Little People swarm in a fit to stop her. A violent storm thunders above the city. Aomame assassinates Leader and goes into hiding until she can escape 1Q84. But before leaving this world she needs to find the boy she has loved since she was a child when they briefly held each other’s hand after class. While in hiding she discovers that she is pregnant. Despite not having seen Tengo for 20 years, she learns that she is pregnant with his child.

Tengo and Aomame reunite. They climb up the emergency stairway to Metropolitan Expressway 3 to get back into the world they left behind. Standing on the Expressway, they realize they may just have stepped into a new unfamiliar world, but it is a world they will journey through together.

— Ian Cusson