'1Q84,' by Haruki Murakami

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. Alfred A. Knopf, 925 pp., $30.50

Midway through Haruki Murakami's massive new novel, a young math teacher and aspiring writer named Tengo confronts his estranged father. Poised on the brink of revelation, the older man scowls. "If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation," he declares, and falls silent.

Murakami's fans (and I am one) have never required an explanation for the wildly imaginative weirdness that saturates his books. His low-key, vaguely baffled narrators resonate with legions of readers; his surreal stories seem plucked from your own half-forgotten dreams, only now endowed with an odd logic.

A three-volume runaway bestseller in Japan, "1Q84" may present a challenge to Murakami loyalists abroad, and not just because of its unpronounceable title or backbreaking heft. Where his previous puzzle-plots were, for all their broad-spectrum allusiveness, surprisingly compact, this one is both tighter in its scope and looser in its delivery, with a narrative that wanders at walking pace and leaves several characters stranded along the way.

It is 1984. Tengo receives an assignment from a subversive editor friend to rework a promising piece of fiction submitted to a prize competition by a mysterious teenage girl. This seems a little dubious to honest Tengo, but the story -- a fantasy in which controlling spirits called Little People emerge from the mouth of a dead goat under a sky with two moons -- has gotten under his skin. "Just brace yourself and enjoy the smell of evil," the editor tells him when the rewritten story wins. But having met the ethereally beautiful girl, Tengo begins to wonder whether her story is really just the product of an overactive adolescent imagination.

Meanwhile, in another Tokyo neighborhood, a fiercely self-sufficient young physical trainer named Aomame is trapped in traffic on the way to an appointment. There's something funny about the taxi driver, but when he points out an emergency stair leading down from the elevated expressway, it seems like a feasible if unorthodox solution. She gets out of the cab, but not before the driver issues a warning that is classic Murakami. "[A]fter you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little," he tells her. "But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality."

Aomame makes it to her appointment -- an assassination (oh, yes, she's also a professional assassin) -- but soon begins to notice inexplicable differences in the world around her, including the appearance of a second moon in the sky. She dubs her new reality 1Q84: "A world that bears a question." In Japanese, "nine" is pronounced kyu (Q).

This parallel world encompasses, among others, a dowager with a fierce determination to rid the world of abusive men, a formidable bodyguard with impeccable taste, a secretive religious cult and a tenacious and alarmingly unattractive private detective who adds a third perspective later in the book. Orwell's hovering presence signals a preoccupation with collective memory and free will, but the book's dominant message verges on sentimental: "If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life." As Tengo and Aomame accelerate toward one another, Murakami's vivid supporting cast fades away.

Murakami's global audience has always embraced the ambiguity in his fiction, but "1Q84" is an especially do-it-yourself experience. If you're an old Murakami hand -- a devotee of earlier works like "A Wild Sheep Chase" or "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" -- there is much to enjoy. If you are new to his off-kilter worlds, there are better places to begin.