Towards a Post-human Condition of the BQdy in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84: From Grief to Nostalgia

The paper discusses the relation between technology and the female body in one of the most controversial books written by the Japanese writer Haruki Muramaki, 1Q84, starting from cyberpunk fiction and its perspective on the human body as one of the research directions put forth in my doctoral thesis Fenomenul Science fiction în cultura postmodernă (The science fiction phenomenon in postmodern culture). Somewhere between science fiction and realistic literature, the novel 1Q84 approaches one of the most interesting issues of the contemporary world: the post-human condition. The discussion of the post-human condition implies a dual perspective. On the one hand, it implies the dissolution of ontological limitations that favour information over matter, understanding consciousness as an epiphenomenon, the body conceived technologically as “adjustable” through an intelligent implant (the cyberbody). On the other hand, the posthuman condition creates a tension that renders problematic the traditional conflict between Nature and Culture, leading to a fictional conceptualization of the human entailing the Biology–Technology relation. With this dual perspective in mind, the prefix post in post-human necessarily implies an evolution to a new order of the human (not necessarily a superior one) in a sort of biological avant-garde. Instead, the paper advances the concept of BQdy for use in Haruki Murakami’s case, offering not a new, evolution-based order of the human (the female body) but a different order or condition which, in the wQrld of 1Q84, is transformed  into a bQdy.

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