I finished 1Q84 — all 3 books of the trilogy! Here are my thoughts…
(Note: I don’t review with a star rating. Those are useful, but working them out doesn’t come naturally to me. I review according to what I thought ,or how I felt, or what stood out for me. I also consider whether I ‘get’ what the author might be trying to do with the work. After all, they can and should write what they want to. We as readers can’t judge their work, only how we personally connected with it at the time.)
So, this book. It’s huge, and it’s famous. Both lend some weight to the experience before you even start reading.
Was it an interesting read? Yes.
In the end, did I like it? Yes.
Did I love it? Parts of it.
Did it inspire me? Not really. I think I went along with the main characters’ journeys here, but they never became part of my own.
Would I recommend it? Yes. But it’s long, and long books are about the reader living in the world of the book, not skimming the surface. If you read it, take your time.
This is the story of thirty year olds Aomame and Tengo in Tokyo. Their parallel narratives are explored in alternating, short chapters. These short chapters are a welcome structure to progress through what is an epic story length. (The answer to the question, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.) Both feel they are outcasts, alone, passing through life and under the invisible weight of their pasts and their upbringing.
Separately, they each take the advice of other people, then make choices and take actions that connect them inadvertently to a mysterious cult and a chain of events. Tengo ghost writes a book and gets closer to its young author. Aomame takes on secret jobs matching her very unique skill set, leading towards one big job. As they do these things and deal with the consequences, a threat to them and their personal stories builds slowly and moves closer. It is not a spoiler to say, their destinies are entwined.
They each realise the world is becoming more unreal and weird around them, no matter what choice they make. Or perhaps the world of 1Q84 is driving those choices.
This book was translated from the Japanese, so would not fair to judge the writing. It’s easy to read, which is important for a book this length. There are descriptions throughout of what people do in small moments, which I can take or leave — how someone lifts their beer to take a sip during a conversation in a cafe is not going to be important — but overall I did feel I was getting deeper into their world with them. An interesting phenomenon is how the thoughts of the characters go from the mundane to the deep quite easily. Just like how, for much of the book, the story progresses in a normal world, and slips into weirdness only at times — this relativity reminds us of what strangeness actually feels like (unlike fantasy world-building where everything is fundamentally strange and so in the story, nothing feels out of the ordinary).
I was perplexed by how the characters are always eating western foods and there are so many western references — only the locations and characters’ names are fully Japanese. Why Murakami has his Tokyo characters eating Italian pasta and then sauteed French food daily is still beyond me. For me the descriptions of Japanese cuisine in Book 3 were a welcome change. But when I realise that the non-Japanese soundtrack’ to this story, appearing a few times was deliberately chosen (Jacnacek’s Sinfonietta — I had to google it and to listen to it to get what Murakami was trying to do here; I hear a somewhat fervent quality and shifting tempo that does suit the otherworldly nature of the narrative) I realise other choices are likely deliberate for other reasons. I accept the art of the artist!
The love story at the centre of the book, and the main reason why I wanted to keep reading reading, is moved along using a detective plot. This touches at the edges of thriller and suspense at times, with cool and restrained descriptions of violence throughout. This does not jar but the length of the book does mean I was travelling through these plot devices a bit longer than I expected. Halfway through these 1386 pages, I could feel the length relative to the story being told, which isn’t a plus.
The character development is one of the best things about the book. I cared about everyone I was reading about, right down to someone’s secretary who was only mentioned for a couple of lines, but with one smile she had be wondering ‘what is she really thinking’? ‘The dowager’ and her right hand Tamaru were always welcome when they were on the page. Even Tengo’s lover, not named until she needed to be, was made interesting through descriptions of the jazz music she loved. I was left feeling that everyone described in the book was on some level worthy of their own novella — this is something special for sure. I mean, Stephen King never left me feeling that. even with his talent for rich character description — but of course I always suspect he intends to kill them off so maybe that is a different literary technique.
My favourite character was: Aomame. The story of how one person can hold on to one thing of true value throughout their life (I won’t spoil as to what that element is) — making her life worth living at all, despite the rest of life always feeling empty — was the anchor for me to keep reading.
My least favourite character was: Ushakawi, the failed lawyer turned persistent, private hound dog. Well written but introduced late and then elevated to a status that I felt diminished the two main protagonists and derailed some of the flow. But as I always say, this is the author’s art, not mine. I respect what he did with the character overall.
As weird as the world gets, this not an ‘experimental’ novel but written in a traditional narrative, and by the end I was hoping for some plots or characters to be wrapped up, or some connections to be made clear; not all of them are. Almost as if they had to go and continue on with their own stories, once the main story ends.
I believe that in the end we as readers put it all together in our own head and what I think it means when I fill a gap can be as important as what the author really meant.
Note: There are also unpalatable adult themes included which I wasn’t expecting to think about — but these are connected directly to the weirdness of the world of 1Q84 and key to the plot. Sorry, to note any more than this would be a spoiler.
An interesting piece of possible foreshadowing appears early on, talking about a book within the book: “This story has none of the new writer’s sense of ‘I want to be another so and so.’… You could pick it apart if you wanted to. But the story has real power: It draws you in… Finally, after you work your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leave a real impression — it gets to you in some strange, inexplicable way that may be a little disturbing.”
If that’s how the author wanted us to see this large work, some of it did ring true by the end. I was drawn in. The way it gets to you is inexplicable.
The trouble is, what is inexplicable can remain so, and then I was left not quite sure if I’d had a positive, middling or negative experience.
I understand many readers struggle to finish the book. It may be because the trilogy is very long, the story meanders from plot to character development to just plain strange, along a slow burning trajectory. You don’t know where you’re going, so you don’t know how long it takes to get there. I found it long but easy to read, and original enough to be interesting.
I was left with one takeaway that was kind of special. The world of 1Q84 was filled with negative experiences and positive ones. But to me, it is only because Murakami’s 1Q84 world existed that the positive ones could happen; they would not happen in ours. I’ll leave it up to you to see if you see it the same way.
Kudos to Murakami for a highly original and ambitious book. I’d recommend it! But I’m not the kind to ever re-read something this long.
Elus Ives
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