1Q84: 3 Volume Boxed Set (Vintage International) (edition 2012)

Was it riveting? No. It was oddly pleasant however, like a dream while taking an afternoon nap. I really enjoyed Murakami's writing style and characterizations much more than the story itself. I will look to his earlier works to see what everyone raves about. This could not possibly be his best work. ( )

I think it's funny when I see bad reviews for this book, because some people think its so awful. I loved it. It was weird, long, repetitive, true. I didn't see anything wrong with that though. I just skipped parts that dragged, and loved the rest of it. I thought and talked about it for weeks after with friends and family. My favorite part was the photo on the back cover ;) ( )

All books are one book: the rubber plant in both this and Blue Castle. All books would be even more one book but that the detail has to be in common between the current book and another not more than two or three back. Also, Aomame likes hers but Valancy doesn't like the one she's responsible for.

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I should maybe wait a few days for the venom to subside. Nah. I really liked Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Norwegian Wood. Now I'm afraid to approach Wild Sheep Chase. It wasn't high up the queue but now I've got to reset my Haruki Murakami meter and remember World and Wood more than this.

It started well and I am not afraid of a 1000-page book. Very early on, this passage warned me: "There was something about the [cab] driver's way of speaking that bothered her, as though he were leaving something important unsaid" (6). Okay, I thought, I'll pay attention to things unsaid. I was pleased to find out, without a spoiler, why the Q: the Japanese word for "nine" sounds like the phonetic letter Q, so 1Q84 should suggest a world (or time) slightly askew. That made sense. The characters showed up and established themselves and action built up and the book progressed well for its first few hundred pages. I figured "If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person" (192) was important if smarmy. "That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories" (293) is more my speed, and "What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past" (308).

By page 509, though, I had become impatient. "If she's so important to you, why have you never looked for her until today?" Good question, and one that lacks a decent answer, then or ever.

The detail began to annoy me because none of it led anywhere or contributed to anything. I'll always give the benefit of the doubt to a metaphor about a pebble in a shoe (526) because of Godspell's "By Your Side" (in which the pebble is called Dare) and Human League's Dare with the song "Open Your Heart." Sadly, the descriptions and sidelines began to feel like sand in my shoe, weighing me down. Unless you're making it yourself or your jacket restricts your ability to climb a tree or the color of your shirt illustrates your personality, for me to know your every stitch of clothing is unnecessary. I understood the translator's need to restate some foods for non-Japanese readers, but the foods of breakfast and the ingredients of dinner don't matter.

You can't have this much emphasis on a cabbie -- his music, his telling Aomame to watch for things out of whack -- and then give even a minor character a husband who drives a cab (809) and have that not mean anything. Unless, of course, you're packing your book with meaningless detail and putting a ballpoint pen in the minor character's hair at almost every mention.

Another couple of hundred pages and I had lost all patience. "Somehow, through a gap in the thunder and rain, the darkness and the murder, a special kind of passageway opened, through some logic I can't understand" (712). You're not the only one who can't understand the logic, lady.

Now I began to nitpick about grammar: was it this sloppy in the original? Clouds "scudded swiftly" (774) -- is it possibly to scud slowly? Do the Japanese have some way to meddle with as and like? There were more sentences in which Winston tasted good like a cigarette should than I could stomach. But hm, the time setting of 1984, the character Winston in 1984, my trying to explain the like/as confusion with a slogan from the '50s ... By golly, that does make a lot of sense!*

Someone recommends reading In Search of Lost Time. Because in 1Q84 you've lost 1984, get it? See? Here's a hammer, see? You're sure you get it? Although Murakami tells the reader exactly what layers a character is wearing and tells the reader that the character is wearing all these layers because it's cold out, he doesn't explain the recommender's joke about madeleines maybe having "a positive effect on the flow of time" (974). Maybe it's fair for Murakami to assume that his Western readers will get the reference, and even for his Japanese ones, but I think it's elitist.

Now I was impatient. Not only food detail but redundancy: "Then he went to a soba noodle shop and ordered a bowl of soba noodles with tempura" (763). "Ushikawa considered going to the discount electrical goods store in front of the station and buying an electric space heater or electric blanket" (769).

This bit did make me laugh: "Most of the daytime programs appealed to housewives and elderly listeners. The people who appeared on the programs told jokes that fell flat, pointlessly burst out laughing, gave their moronic, hackneyed opinions, and played music so awful you felt like covering your ears. Periodically they gave blaring sales pitches for products no one could possibly want" (764).
I couldn't decide if this passage suited this book or "Car Talk" better.

Murakami set this 2010 book in 1984 I think only because of 1984. No internet for research, no mobile phones for more direct communication, newspapers still viable, but it could have as easily been set up to the mid 1990s and he still could have worked the 9/Q pun into any of those years. Whatever. What makes no sense is an apartment building with only one door, no backdoor, no fire exit, and apartments without peepholes in their front doors. Not that I know anything about residential safety code in Japan now or 30 years ago.

Several elements are left hanging [spoiler alert]:

• Fuka-Eri and Aomame are clearly the same person or the two parts of a whole as the Little People explain. That's how Tengo could impregnate Aomame. Does Fuka-Eri exist in the normal world?


• What happened to Kyoko Yasuda?


• How did Fuka-Eri know Ushikawa was surveilling?


• If Aomame and Tengo go up the stairway into 1984 and leave 1Q84 behind them, is Aomame still pregnant?

* This is from Bloom County when Milo and Opus go to spring Bill from a cult. A member explains the religion to Opus, who in his loveably open-minded way responds, "By golly, that does make a lot of sens-- " whereupon Milo hisses at him from the bushes to snap out of it. That, OMFB, is what I learned in college. (That strip ran when I was in high school but I read the books at UConn. A lot.) ( )

This book was so long and so strange that I’m not even sure where to start telling you what it was about, but I’ll do my best. The story involves two main characters and we alternate between their view points. Aomame is an assassin and Tengo is a writer. As the story progresses, they get pulled closer and closer together by events that initially seemed unrelated but which turn out to have a deep connection. The book involves questions of destiny and pre-determination, parallel worlds and some surprising magical elements.

Like my summary above, the synopsis I read before starting 1Q84 told me what the story was about but gave me no idea what the story was going to be like. I think the best genres labels to describe the book are “literary” and “magical realism”. The writing reminded me of both Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. Like Ray Bradbuy, Murakami shares strange and incredible things as though they’re normal. He also matches Bradbury’s ability to craft sentences so beautiful I just want to read them out loud. Like King, I felt a build up of a suspense through the many mundane details, a certainty that something wasn’t quite right below the surface. Since I like both King and Bradbury, I consider this high praise and well deserved. The writing was superb.

Although I can’t disagree with those who say 1Q84 was longer than it needed to be, I think I liked that about it. I loved the quotes from other stories that seem like the author’s way of telling you something about his story. I loved the beautiful descriptions of people and places and feelings, the incredibly apt analogies. I loved the way everything was interconnected. I loved the way hearing the most intimate thoughts and dreams and memories of the characters gives you a much deeper connection than you can usually get with fictional characters. And I loved that all the characters were so unique. What prevented this from being a five star review for me was the abruptness of the ending. There’s a lot of build up to one particular event, which passed by too quickly and left me with the feeling that this already-long novel still needed a sequel. I have, however, read several reviews that suggest this is not one of Murakami’s best works, so I’ll definitely be looking to read more by this author.

This review first published on Doing Dewey. ( )

Despite the length, this book had a flow to it that made it feel much shorter. I'd call it tight plotting except that Murakami seems to have almost Neal Stephenson-esque digressions and a similar love of loose ends. And yet even as I write what should be criticisms, I find myself not even a smidge worried about their impact on my enjoyment; as a cohesive story 1Q84 all makes sense at the end and I was left feeling satisfied.

While I found it to be a relatively smooth read, this is a dense book with themes of magical realism and a deep-down questioning of reality that reminds me of a Philip K. Dick story. Murakami's not shy about meta-fictional discussions either; in several places a smile came to my face as one of the main characters -- an aspiring novelist -- talks about the mechanics of writing with an editor friend, and I couldn't help but thinking how Murakami was in some sense talking about his own construction of the book. And the meta-fictional theme intersects with the questionable nature of reality as a key premise of the story, linking the two main characters with something like a fairy tale.

I'd certainly rate this as one of the better books I've read, not despite its quirks but because of them. ( )