Released just a day apart, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84... • The Automaton

Released just a day apart, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs have more things in common than their week of publication. There’s the quite obvious similarity of their being big, physically and commercially: At nearly a thousand pages, 1Q84 is now considered by many as the popular Japanese author’s magnum opus, while Steve Jobs’s 600-plus pages have made it the year’s best of the best-selling hardcovers. But familiarity with both books, it turns out, reveals a couple of more interesting manners of likeness.

1Q84 and Steve Jobs both contain a considerable amount of musical references. As is customary for Murakami, 1Q84 is sprinkled with allusions and unmasked citations of pop, jazz, and classical pieces famous and obscure. It’s epigraph is a stanza of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and it’s opening scene has the unlikely instance of a Tokyo taxi driver listening to Leoš Janáček’s “Sinfonietta.” On the other hand, Steve Jobs, being a portrait of Steve Jobs, is only fair to mention the late Apple CEO’s musical preferences, most notably Bob Dylan. Jobs, the book recounts, wanted Dylan to perform at his thirtieth birthday celebration, but the musician declined. Jobs invited Ella Fitzgerald instead.

The more significant similarity, though, is already hinted at by the curious title of Murakami’s novel. 1Q84 is a pun on the year 1984, in which the book is set: the Japanese “9” is pronounced “Q.” It’s also a play on George Orwell’s 1984, whose iconic Big Brother inspired, albeit inversely, the mysterious Little People in 1Q84. 1984, Steve Jobs informs readers below 30, also inspired the famous 1984 Macintosh ad directed by Ridley Scott, no less, and premiered by Apple at Super Bowl XVIII. 1984 was a big year, apparently.

Another thing 1Q84 and Steve Jobs have in common: In a bout of biblio-bigamy, I’m reading both.