Customer Reviews

1Q84

5 star:		(91)
4 star:		(52)
3 star:		(43)
2 star:		(40)
1 star:		(55)

 

 

I am rushing this review to warn other Murakami fans (fanatics?) that this one starts out surprisingly slow. It wasn't until Part 2 that the pace started approaching a typical Murakami. I am also warning those who have never read Murakami before that that is NOT the novel to start with.

As always with his novels, it is of little value to attempt a plot summary. Cults and Little People and two moons? Yep, sounds like Murakami. In fact you can open the book to any section and after a few minutes know that you can be reading no author other than Murakami. It is a highly unusual voice, and comes through as distinctively in this as in his other books.

There are two main characters, a man and a woman who knew each other as children. Both had typically Murakami odd lonely childhoods, and though they haven't seen each other since they were young, both continue to remember the other with a particular intensity. In alternating chapters we follow the lives of these two, and soon we figure out that their stories are slowly (oh so slowly) leading towards each other.

As always, I am immensely enjoying reading this book. But I do have reservations. The book is too long, maybe 1/3rd too long. A typical feature in his books is to present an idea, an object, a reference from one perspective, and then repeat it, often multiple times, from other perspectives. Only through these repeated narrow views does the reader begin to piece together the true import of what is being presented. This layering of perspectives, added to the unusual nature of what is being seen, is core to the world Murakami unveils to us in his fiction. The problem in this book is that the perspectives are over-layered and at some point lose their power. I was thoroughly sick of the Little People, two moons, 1Q84... the entire "other" world way before it even really appears. There are insufficient ideas for the size of the book, and this increasingly claustrophobic duality of the 2 worlds and 2 characters coming increasingly close simply gets old after a few hundred pages.

I've read every single book by Murakami, including the non-fiction cult and running books, but this is the only one that has not 100% engaged me. His characters are usually somewhat flat, and it works well for the hyper-active worlds these characters inhabit. But that same flatness continued for almost 1,000 pages is tough. Without the characters as a strong focus for the readers, you are forced to concentrate on the events as the main focus of the book, and following flat characters through a dizzying world of ever accelerating events left this reader exhausted. I expect to have my reactions mediated through the characters actually living those events. But because these two characters are emotionally stunted I found myself almost ignoring their responses as my mind leapt straight into the events themselves.

I realize this is a less than coherent review, but I am trying to explain how this book by one of my favorite authors has so far left me alternately bored and exhausted, yet I can still recommend it to fans of Murakami, since we've been without a novel from him for too long.

The above is a quote from this book, and well worth taking to heart. I take Jung's advice on dream images when reading a Murakami novel: don't try to unravel the underlying/hidden meaning, just stay with the images and let them move you and revel their meaning/feeling slowly.

There are images in this novel that will stay with me for years.

I'm a big fan and this is certainly one of his best novels, right there with works like The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Like all those works, reading the novel felt like slowly sinking into a well of dreams, and being enveloped in a mood of curiosity and off hand beauty/absurdity.

Some of the early reviews seem to be complaining about the book being repetitious, and the characters being too passive. All I can say is, this must be the first Murakami books you've read. This describes many of his books.

The passivity of the characters is actually essential to this book which deals with a world bereft of meaningful stories, and people susceptible to meaning that gives the false impression of depth [cults in this case].

Repetition is a form of making real in Murakami. The meanings are in the images, the images often begin as shadows, the novel takes those shadows and through echoes like a jazz song it breaths life into them: sometimes quite literally as in his book Hard Boiled Wonderland. I love it, but someone not used to it might find it odd.

As far as the more fantastic elements, I'll let Murakami speak for himself:

"I don't want to persuade the reader that it's a real thing; I want to show it as it is. In a sense, I'm telling those readers that it's just a story--it's fake. But when you experience the fake as real, it can be real. It's not easy to explain.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it's the real thing. But I don't. I'm not pretending it's the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it's a commitment, it's a true relationship. That's what I want to write about." - 2004

To me this captures what I resonate with in Murakami's fiction: finding reality in simple things[cooking, having a bear, off hand conversations, relationships, music, art, thinking] in a world that is surreal or hyperreal much of the time. Even the surreal when followed deeper always leads to more reality not less in Murakami, you just can't cop out along the way, like how so many other postmodern writers do, you got to go deep into the well to use a often repeated Murakami image.

So overall, if you enjoy his works like me, this is a must read and a good time : If you've never read him, you might want to start with something shorter[I'd recommend Hard boiled wonderland].

P.S. The initial review was based on the first two books[UK edition], and now just having finished the third part [US edition] I can honestly say I felt satisfied with the ending. Murakami is very hit and miss with endings in my book, but this one worked for me. Also there are some great secondary characters here, my favorite overall might well be the private detective who shows up more prominently in the third book.

Imagine everything you love about your favorite cocktail; the way the ingredients intermingle, often with hints of flavors that, while unbearable on their own, blend magnificently with others to create a mixed concoction to stimulate even the most nether regions of the human tongue. Now dump your glass into a gallon jug. Fill the jug to the 3/4 mark with water. Then add clam juice, tabasco sauce, maple syrup, nutmeg, and vanilla extract til you get to the top. Voila! You've got 1Q84. Drink it down, consumers.

I'm currently 720 pages in and have resorted to skipping whole paragraphs. Why I feel the need to continue despite a blossoming blase could perhaps best be explained by my previous Murakami experience- I first read all of his books within a span of 10 days using a flood light outside of my hotel in Singapore. Despite this I just can't see the point of 1Q84 (other than length, of course). Put simply, 1Q84 is a meandering odyssey to nowhere in particular.

Reading 1Q84, you'll find that many of Murakami's "trademarks" are present: the contrast of an ultra-sentimental/nostalgic (natsukashii -_-) love story to its surreal sci-fiesque backdrop; minute details of each character's appearance and daily routine to make up for an otherwise flat individual; allusions to Western artists galore. What 1Q84 fails to provide is something to tie everything together into a neat little package to make me care what happens. The two main characters are eternally and subliminally united by troubled youths, voided personalities, and a single hand grab decades prior to the events of the story. My advice to Murakami is that when you're building a love story on such a thin and unrealistic connection, no matter how many times you recite their devotion to finding one another, having little people coming out of goats' mouths saying "ho ho" at random intervals throughout the book is enough to distract me from the central plot. Never mind all the other random and unresolved "supernatural" events that take place and there are many. In other words- it takes such a large extension of my "benefit of the doubt" to buy into this nearly unbelievable love connection (the pursuit of which is the closest thing to a unifying plot you'll find here) that the inclusion of such random and jolting distractions just made me abandon any wish to connect to or identify with any element of the story. Ho ho!

A few other things I found disagreeable:

- Question: How many times per chapter can a character come to some sort of "OHHH... I thought things were THIS way, but it turns out they're THAT way" conclusion? Answer: At least 3-7 on average. Factor this out over 920ish pages and you have a very very annoying method of character and plot development. I reckon there are about 100 of these sentences with barely any variation. Ho ho! This is not an exaggeration.

- The same criticism holds true of the characters' thoughts on whatever world they might be in at a given time. Let's just all agree that something odd is going on and just do away with these OMG moments. Hard Boiled did this bluntly; Kafka was the ideal subdued approach. 1Q84 is just awkward in the same way as my first criticism. Paraphrased sample: "And then Tengo finally realized that at some point, the world he had known had become this new and different world, like a train switching tracks." There. I summarized about 60 pages of text. Ho ho!

- The sex scenes are just terrible. Superfluous breast descriptions probably amount to 6 pages of text. I remember reading a review on here that described these segments as being "borderline pornographic." I assure you, if they were anything close to being borderline pornographic I would have been far more interested. And Murakami is usually so capable when it comes to meaningful sexual moments! Alas, it pains me to say that 1Q84 fails miserably in this respect. I recall better examples, such as those with Kafka and his maybe sister (the one on the bus sticks out (pun intended *teehee*)- tasteful and poignant). Ho ho! Ayn Rand would make for a better writer of erotic fiction than the Murakami of 1Q84, and that makes me cry a little inside.

- Unbearably redundant at times. Case in point: How many pages do we need to explain the same physical characteristics of Ushikawa? Probably about 14, but I don't care enough to go back and count. These useless details just thump into you. Ho ho! After a while I found myself just skipping pages of the same descriptions. This is filler, not literature.

These are not the only flaws present, but are such that they will remain flaws no matter how the rest of the book turns out.

Bottom line? If you really want to read 900+ pages of Murakami, read Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and maybe Wind-up Bird Chronicle. If it were less than 600 pages I'd have given it a second star. I'm off to make myself a pot of coffee and finish this turd so I can move on to greener pastures.

UPDATE: Finished the book. I give the ending a "Meh +" but my relief at finally being done may have colored that. For some reason it feels as if there were no middle of the book... like the middle of the book and first and last parts were in some totally different WORLD. Get it? I'm mocking an oft-used phrase. Ho ho! Remember that sentence format because you will encounter it dozens of times. (Maybe the little people and I were just from an entirely different WORLD. Something something THIS world, compared to something something THAT world. Look at me trying to figure things out. I'm a character in 1Q84, which is like 1984 but in a different WORLD.)

Looking back on the experience, it seems like 1Q84 parallels my own writing style when it comes to longer school papers: 1) Start with a quirky thesis/topic in which readers can see potential for enjoyment and profoundness; 2) Realize that this is a 25 page paper, that I have only one page done, and that it's due tomorrow; 3) Write 20 pages or so of gibberish that loosely develops some kind of discussion, leading readers meandering down meaningless tangents never to be resolved (Ho ho!); 4) See that it's already 4 A.M. and wrap things up (for the most part) in a page in 15 minutes.

In summation- This book is arbitrary and ****ing long. Like I said before: if you're after good Murakami (ESPECIALLY if you're from the WORLD of new readers) here is NOT the place to start. And this is coming from a very big fan of his. I wonder if Knopf kept hectoring reviewers until they said something nice about it. Oh, and Chip Kidd is an excellent graphic designer. I repeat: please do not let 1Q84 turn you off to one of the world's best authors of contemporary fiction. Ho ho!

I'm glad that at least The New York Times agrees with me. Ho ho!

I have also read all of Murakami's books, including the short story collections, Pinball, and his book on running. As I read through all of his previous books, I was mesmerized, unable to put the book(s) down, often reading or re-reading them in a single day. Frequently, I have had the rather strange experience of feeling like my mind was being opened, not merely creatively, but physically, even feeling like I was losing my grip on this world - and no, that isn't a normal experience for me. However, almost immediately, as I began IQ84, I was disappointed.

The beginning of the book hardly even seemed like Murakami and I had the distinct feeling that he was pushing himself to write rather than being internally driven to expression as in all of his prior books. Instead of the book flowering creatively and dynamically from some unconscious well into a new world, this one seemed crafted logically, and philosphers (Camus excepted) are rarely great fiction writers. Because of this predetermined path that Murakami seems to have for this novel, he apparently failed to realize some rather silly mistakes, particularly in places where he was attempting to move the plot forward, using artifical means to get to where he wanted the plot to be.

The initial conversation with Fuka-Eri's guardian is a great example. The guardian is talking about how concerned he was for Fuka-Eri's parents who had seemingly disappeared within the religious cult of Sakigake and how he was attempting to find out more about them but hitting a brick wall. The problem is those parents had apparently abandoned their 10 year old daughter, and the parents last known whereabouts are within Sakigake, as founding members. Wouldn't the easiest thing, and most logical thing, be to simply go to the police and say, "Hey this is the 10 year old daughter of some close friends of mine who were running Sakigake, who just came mysteriously to my house and we need to find out what happened to her parents." I don't know how it works in Japan, but here in the U.S. the parents would be found and charged with abandonment if their 10 year old just ran off and they didn't try to find her, or have any idea where she was at. Instead, the Professor did all this other ridiculous stuff, from the outside, never telling the police anything...huh? It makes no sense. Then, at the end of the conversation with the Professor, Tengo asks him if he has permission to re-write Air Chrysalis... Uhm...he's not the legal guardian of Fuka-Eri, as the Professor pointed out in detail since he never went to the police and created any sort of legal guardianship, so how can he give any kind of permission that matters?

Another problem, in a similar vein, had to do with the discussions between Ayumi and Aomame. The sexual conversations between Aomame and Ayumi seemed ridiculous. I think Murakami is much better at observing women through the eyes of a main male character than creating an authentic female voice through a female character, at least he doesn't do a good job here. In fact, in some of his past novels his female characters have poked fun at the main male character for knowing nothing about women...I think this might be accurate in some sense for Murakami. I kind of felt like I was reading an article from a guy, pretending to be a girl, writing about a lesbian experience to Penthouse magazine. Maybe Japanese women are different than American women, but it just didn't ring through as authentic with me, so it stuck out like a sore thumb. Women are generally more protective of each other and sensitive than Murakami portrayed Ayumi, particularly when she was a woman who had been sexually abused in her childhood. "It was like a porno", Ayumi says after her night of having a foursome with Aomame with two strange men, where Aomame doesn't even remember what happens but realizes from the mornings physical sensations, that she had anal sex with one of the men...that strikes me as what a guy would say after a night like that, not what a woman would say. As I was reading this passage, my first thought was that Aomame had been dropped GHB, or some similar drug and raped. That was certainly a reasonable concern and given that Aomame didn't know Ayumi that well, she should have been concerned that this "friend" might somehow have been involved in getting her raped. Instead, she takes it all in stride like it was no big deal.

There were parts where the usual best Murakami was still shining through, enough of them to get me to read the book to the end, but there were way too many spots where he was taking liberties with the characters to move the plot in the direction he wanted rather than letting the story grow naturally. the character Ushikawa is a great example of this. Basically, out of thin air Ushikawa figures out everything that has happened to the Sakigake Leader, then he starts looking for evidence of what he already knows and only because he figured it out in a flash of brilliant insight was he able to start uncovering the pieces that link the Leader's fate back to the other characters. That isn't how things really happen, but Murakami apparently couldn't figure out another way of getting where he wanted the story to go.

Having read all of Murakami's prior novels, I was always left with the feeling that Murakami was a truly and unique and amazing writer. The best writers hit foul balls from time to time, but Murakami never seemed to. Every novel was amazing in its own right, and each novel was casually and creatively linked to all the others in various ways. It almost seemed to me as if Murakami was putting together a series of linked islands that collectively explained the workings of the mind, consciously and unconsciously, and thus the world itself, as it appears and as it may be behind those appearances. More importantly, I felt that through his novels he was opening up the reader's mind, quieting our conscious desires, that our everyday world invigorates, and encouraging us to look within, rather than without. This novel, however, doesn't belong in the archipelago he has been creating. This is Murakami's first foul ball, and for the first time he may have been looking without, rather than within.

I have always thought that fame, or the desire for it (and the desire for money, which are really kissing cousins), kills creativity. Murakami seemed to understand that, both in his life and his works, and I believe it was for that reason that he has been such a beautifully successful writer. But this novel struck me as his first attempt to create a magnum opus, a crowning acheivement that might push him Nobel Prize conversations; when all he really needed to do was to continue to let his natural creativity spill out into the world without concern for the results. The soul shrinks from the conscious mind's desires, whether it is the conscious desire for fame or anything else, and it seems to have given Murakami a slap on the hand. I hope he realizes it, and the authentic Murakami returns again with a new novel.

I usually enjoying reading long books and I usually enjoy reading Murakami, unfortunately, 1Q84 failed to capture my interest. At around page 646 I was ready to throw the book out the window. This novel is desperately in need of an editor, but apparently Mr. Murakami is such a well regarded author that nobody dared suggest any cuts. The continuous repetitions made the novel grotesquely simplistic and without meaning. If this is supposed to be a novel of ideas, or an updated version of Orwell it fails.

Murakami is a fantastic author, i have read all of his books. This book is good, parts of it are really are brilliant but it drags on. Its very typical murakami, but suffers from being overly long by 200-300 pages. It can be repetitive, and i felt he devoted too much time to the story of ushikawa when you really wanted more of the central plot to be revealed/discussed in depth. I agree with other reviews if you are going to read murakami this is not the book to start with. For what was supposed to be his magnum opus i was a bit disappointed, i think the wind up bird chronicle was a far better book.

I have read all but 1 of murakami's novels and his book about Running and The Tokyo Gas attack. I have enjoyed them all, some more than others, but overall I really liked reading his books. That being said, I have no idea what happened to this book. It was about 350 pages too long. I found myself skipping half of each of the final 15 chapters because the majority of each one was just a recap of what had happened up until that point. As in all his books the plot was creative and the characters somewhat interesting, but I found the writing in this book to be horrible. IT was boring and seemed to me that he was being forced to write it instead of writing it for his own enjoyment. I am baffled that it is winning all this praise because i found it to be, for lack of a better word, very boring.

I love character driven novels and was taken by the idea of the fantastical nature of this one. The reviews that I had read were overwhelmingly positive. When the book arrived I was even enthralled with how beautiful it was, with its rice paper book jacket. Then I started reading. "Maybe it just starts slow," I thought, when I read the clumsy, repetious descriptions of the music on the radio and Anomame's clothing as she spent three pages descending a simple ladder. "Maybe he just isn't very good at writing about sex," I thought as I read a painfully horrible lesbian sex scene followed by an even more horrible anonymous sex scene. "Maybe he thinks sex sells," I thought, when it became apparent that the most of the sex in the book was superfluous and bland. And so on, until I realized, "Maybe I'm making too many excuses for a book with this much acclaim."

The characters, on whose shoulders the book rides, are one dimensional, the females in particular. The plot is driven by manufactured plot devices, for example, an immaculate conception. There is social commentary on totalitarianism and the need of humans to find meaning in life. I understand that it is this neo-Orwellian piece of the novel that is driving so much of its praise. I don't get it. Orwell did it better. Hell, Orwell, Atwood, Lowry, Kafka, the list goes on and on, they ALL did it better. There are dozens of beautiful books about the need of humans to find meaning and the trouble with finding it in a charismatic, dictator. So, I don't understand the heaping of praise on to 1Q84.

I must confess I have not read Murakami's other work. Perhaps this is much ado about a great author who the literati believe should be recoganized. If so, great. Recognize one of his better books. But not this one. It is clumsy, redundant, thin on character development but not saved by plot. In sum, it is plodding, preacy, and pedantic. To beat it all, its really friggin' long. I couldn't wait to put the durn thing down.

I've read everything else written by Murakami that is available in English, and enjoyed all of his previous books, but this book made me think that either he's lost his touch as an author, or that someone else wrote it for him (or with him), just as one of the main characters in 1Q84 rewrites a mysterious and mystical book for one of the other main characters. If you're already a Murakami fan, you can probably grunt your way through this tedious, badly written, overly long chunk of fiction. If you're not a Murakami fan, I'll bet you're going to delete it from your Kindle or resell your paper copy long before you finish it. I did read the whole thing because I was hoping that Murakami could somehow breathe a bit more life into his own characters as well as make sense of the plot, but he didn't, and I barely made it to the end.

I hesitate to use big words like "colossal failure" or "the apex of mediocrity" when describing Murakami's self-proclaimed "magnum opus," but this novel is, in every sense of the word, a failure. It fails to engage. It fails to delight. It fails to mystify. Murakami paints a picture of a great lake, as deep as it is blue and invites you to jump in, only, when you do actually make that plunge, you realize that the lake is frozen solid and it's depths non-existent.

Without spoiling anything concrete, the story primarily consists of chapters alternating between the point of view of the two main characters, Tengo and Aomame. Aomame is a flat, utterly one-dimensional heroine working for a mysterious dowager; their shared purpose is disposing of violent men who abuse women and children, a theme that Murakami expounds on in the first volume and then mostly kicks to the curb as the story progresses. Tengo, on the other hand, is a directionless superhuman content to languish in mediocrity. He's a math prodigy and a master of jiu jitsu whose talents have taken a back seat to his empty existence. Afraid to take chances, he questions himself at every turn despite the fact that every single person he runs into envies his latent genius and rock hard abs. He's convinced by another character (that Murakami abandons for a wide swath of the book) to rewrite Fuka-Eri's possibly auto-biographical account of her experiences in Sakigake's cult stronghold which in turn serves as the catalyst for a number of events that draw Tengo and Aomame towards the center of a slow-moving conspiracy that threatens to sever their extremely tenuous and ultimately unbelievable connection forever.

In the second volume, Murakami abruptly reveals that all that violence and abuse stuff isn't really all that important anymore, and in fact even retcons facts related to that violence through an arbiter that guest stars for perhaps two chapters and then abruptly exits stage left. This arbiter is the only character in the book whose wisdom extends past his pinky-toe, however Murakami fails to really seize the moment and instead this character rehashes events that have already transpired and then offers a few cryptic clues about the future that ultimately don't influence much of anything. The latter half of 1Q84 is dedicated to mundane descriptions of characters boiling water and making coffee while they wander around a small section of Tokyo and fail to run into each other time and time again. Eventually he adds a new character to the mix whose primary role is (I assume) to add tension to what is effectively a plot with the depth and breadth of a puddle of water, but ultimately this character serves only as a scapegoat to deus ex machina that paves the way towards the one and only possible conclusion.

Murakami contrasts the subtle surreality in the book with vivid descriptions of mundane repetition. As I mentioned before, characters repeatedly boil water, drink coffee, question their reality and experiences and compare themselves to characters in fiction novels, stare at the moon(s), and wander aimlessly through their respective neighborhoods while the sinister Sakigake cult twiddles its thumbs and claims time and again that "bad things" could happen if they could just decide to get it together. Long descriptions and analysis of extremely underwhelming events are presented from multiple reoccurring viewpoints in what at first appears to be chronological order, however one eventually realizes that a number of next chapters are essentially rehashes of unimportant events that occurred previously from alternate points of view that ultimately offer no new information or analysis. This soul-crushing mediocrity gets so repetitive and uninteresting that at one point towards the end of the book Murakami breaks out of the narrative, tears down the third wall, and speaks directly to the reader, idly wondering how events would have transpired if he had maintained any narrative momentum or injected even the slightest bit of hardship into the characters' idle existences.

The plot isn't the only thing that feels mechanical, however. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel team up to translate this behemoth of a novel and I think, achieve what is perhaps the densest, most mechanical translation I've ever had the displeasure of slogging through. I know that I can't entirely blame them (Gabriel did an amazing job on Kafka on the shore, for instance) for what is essentially the most direct of translations and probably a joy for purists who want English that most closely matches Murakami's very "strange" Japanese, but having read the first third or so of the book in Japanese when it was released in Japan, I think that they should have perhaps hired their own Tengo Kawana to rework the translation into something more closely resembling natural English.

This novel is not without it's merit(s), however. The ending is effective and satisfying, perhaps because the journey there is so boring and convoluted. I can safely say that Murakami nailed it-- quite a surprise considering that he usually has trouble concluding his work effectively in his long-form writing. Additionally, this book shares a number of themes Murakami has explored throughout his career, namely the concept of parallel worlds, the idea that reality is relative, and the appearance of "little people" in some form or another so literature buffs will have something to discuss over tea at the next book club meeting. Murakami himself handily supplies a helpful study guide at the end of the book just in case you couldn't tell that he was trying to ride the coattails of far more successful works like 1984 and Infinite Jest. (Yes, he actually mentions Infinite Jest. Hah!)

If you've already exhausted Murakami's back catalog, rummaged through his short stories and autobiographical flings, and read Kafka on the Shore (by far his best work, in my humble opinion), then I suppose that 1Q84 is probably your next destination despite the fact that I'm going to tell you straight: it's not really worth your time. Boil some water, make some drip coffee, and let your eyes glaze over folks, it's "picaresque" and unfathomable, says Murakami. But really, it's just vanity.