Still, what troubles me most about “1Q84” isn’t these surface gaffes but the psychological and moral void below. A book, after all, is also a kind of paper moon: an artificial cosmos that works only insofar as we believe in it. Murakami is normally a master of rendering even the most far-fetched ideas strangely plausible, but here he stumbles. Aomame and Tengo turn out to be connected by a trivial incident that took place when they were 10; we’re asked to believe that they’ve longed for each other desperately ever since. Nothing gives this even a nanoparticle of psychological plausibility, which leaves “1Q84” dangerously unstaked. It is, in essence, an unconvincing love story.

Similarly, while Murakami novels are far from moralizing, they typically foster a kind of contemplative moral mood. In his books, both self and world are profoundly unstable: universes divide and multiply like cells in mitosis, and characters come apart, literally — into mind and body, self and shadow, ego and alter ego. Meanwhile, ostensibly separate people mysteriously merge. All this raises serious questions. Do events transpire inside or outside the mind? Where do I end and you begin? How should we isolated-yet-connected entities treat one another? Percolating up from Murakami’s novels, like groundwater in his famous recurrent wells, are the central questions of epistemology, psychology and ethics. Not bad for a guy who writes about spaghetti.

Yet this humane, expansive inquiry founders in “1Q84.” The title alludes to George Orwell’s “1984” (and plays with words: the English “Q” and the Japanese “9” are homophones), and the Little People represent a modernized Big Brother. But where Orwell offered a bracing parable about the horrors of totalitarianism, the ethos of “1Q84” borders on incoherent. There’s much talk of “evil” in the book, but it boils down to the belief that iniquity is either in the eye of the beholder or a stabilizing force in human society. (“The most important thing . . . is for there to be a balance maintained between good and evil.”) The former is moral relativism at its glibbest; the latter, bizarrely, a sales pitch for the dark side.

No wonder, then, that for all the atrocity in this book, there’s never any sense of real wrongdoing, or real pain. In “1984,” the story serves to convey ideas about power, injustice and cruelty. In “1Q84,” power, injustice and cruelty are fantasy elements in service of a story. As a consequence, no matter how appalling an act may be, its moral status remains ambiguous, even irrelevant. After the Little People impel a man to assault 10-year-old girls, Aomame confronts him: “And so you raped your own daughter.” “I had congress with her,” he demurs. What of another little girl’s uterus, torn so badly that it rendered her infertile? “What you saw was the outward manifestation of a concept, not an actual substance,” he replies. Aomame rolls with it. Maybe, she concludes, the man “raped nothing more than the girls’ shadows.”

I’m no fan of moral absolutism, but I’m troubled by Murakami’s willingness to use the rape of children as mere metaphor, and by the general ethical impassivity pervading this book. I’ve always appreciated the frank, idiosyncratic way Murakami characters experience sex, even if a whiff of implausible male fantasy lingers over the sheets. And trust me when I say I appreciate a steamy scene between a female cop and a female assassin as much as the next guy (arguably more). In “1Q84,” though, there’s something cartoonish and leering about much of the sex — and, more troubling, most of the violence. The ostensibly straight Aomame, mourning both a victim of domestic violence and a friend strangled by a stranger during sex, mainly seems to grieve for “their lovely breasts — breasts that had vanished without a trace.”

Is that offensive, unrealistic or just insane? The same question could be asked of the entire book. “1Q84” is psychologically unconvincing and morally unsavory, full of lacunas and loose ends, stuffed to the gills with everything but the kitchen sink and a coherent story. By every standard metric, it is gravely flawed. But, I admit, standard metrics are difficult to apply to Murakami. It’s tempting to write that out of five stars, I’d give this book two moons. In fact, though, I’d give it back what it gave me: an entire universe, all of it far out, some of it dazzling, whole swaths of it just empty space and dark matter.

In the end, Tengo puts it best. “You could pick it apart completely if you wanted to,” he acknowledges. And yet, “after you work your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leaves a real impression — it gets to you.” He’s describing “Air Chrysalis,” but the same could be said of this book. It’s a credit to Murakami’s mammoth talent that “1Q84,” for all its flaws, got to me more than most decent books I’ve read this year, and lingered with me far longer: a paper moon, yes, but by a real star.