1Q84 [Kindle Edition]

Haruki Murakami (Author), Jay Rubin (Translator), Philip Gabriel (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2011: The year is 1984, but not for long. Aomame, on her way to meet a client--the gravid implications of which only come clear later--sits in a taxi, stuck in traffic. On a lark, she takes the driver's advice, bolts from the cab, walks onto the elevated Tokyo expressway, descends an emergency ladder to the street below, and enters a strange new world.

In parallel, a math teacher and aspiring novelist named Tengo gets an interesting offer. His editor has come upon an entry for a young writer's literary prize, a story that, despite its obvious stylistic drawbacks, strikes a deeply moving chord with those who've read it. Its author is a mysterious 17-year-old, and the editor proposes that Tengo quietly rewrite the story for the final round of the competition.

So begins Haruki Murakami's magnus opus, an epic of staggering proportions. As the tale progresses, it folds in a deliciously intriguing cast of characters: a physically repulsive private investigator, a wealthy dowager with a morally ambiguous mission, her impeccably resourceful bodyguard, the leader of a somewhat obscure and possibly violent religious organization, a band of otherworldly "Little People," a door-to-door fee collector seemingly immune to the limits of space and time, and the beautiful Fuka-Eri: dyslexic, unfathomable, and scarred.

Aomame names her new world "1Q84" in honor of its mystery: "Q is for 'question mark.' A world that bears a question.'" Weaving through it, central motifs--the moon, Janáček's Sinfonietta, George Orwell's 1984--acquire powerful resonance, and Aomame and Tengo's paths take on a conjoined life of their own, dancing with a protracted elegance that requires nearly 1,000 pages to reach its crowning denouement.

1Q84 was a runaway best seller in its native Japan, but it's more instructive to frame the book's importance in other ways. For one, it's hard not to compare it to James Joyce's Ulysses. Both enormous novels mark their respective author's most ambitious undertaking by far, occupy an artificially discrete unit of time (Ulysses, one day; 1Q84, one year), and can be read as having a narrative structure that evinces an almost quantum-mechanical relationship to reality, which is not to say that either author intended this.

More to the point, the English translation of 1Q84--easily the grandest work of world literature since Roberto Bolaño's 2666--represents a monstrous literary event. Now would somebody please award Murakami his Nobel Prize? --Jason Kirk

Review

A Globe and Mail Best Book

“1Q84 goes further than any Murakami novel so far, and perhaps further than any novel before it, toward exposing the delicacy of the membranes that separate love from chance encounters, the kind from the wicked, and reality from what people living in the pent-up modern world dream about when they go to sleep under an alien moon.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Murakami’s fiction has grown increasingly relevant to our understanding of the world today, and this time his craft is more refined than ever. . . . This novel—mired in death and fetish, leavened with humor—may become a mandatory read for anyone trying to get to grips with contemporary Japanese culture.”
—The Japanese Times

“‘Things are not what they seem.’ If Murakami’s ambitious, sprawling and thoroughly stunning new novel had a tagline, that would be it. . . . Orwellian dystopia, sci-fi, the modern world (terrorism, drugs, apathy, pop novels)—all blend in this dreamlike, strange and wholly unforgettable epic.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“You'll find genuine wisdom and emotional depth in 1Q84. Mr. Murakami has gone further here to develop the sensations of loss and isolation.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Murakami really does stand alone . . . Which other author can remind you simultaneously of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and JK Rowling, not merely within the same chapter but on the same page? Viewed through the ‘postmodern’ lens, his exemplary blend of a light touch and weighty themes, of high literature and popular entertainment, ticks every box. Posh and pop, sublimity and superficiality, history and fantasy, trash and transcendence: they switch positions and then fuse as the metaphysical speculations of an Ivan Karamazov meet the death-defying adventures of a Harry Potter.”
—The Independent (UK)


Praise for Haruki Murakami:
"Murakami is like a magician who explain what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers... But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's a rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves."
— The New York Times Book Review

 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 2120 KB
• Publisher: Knopf (October 25, 2011)
• Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004LROUW2
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (281 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #714 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #42 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Literary Fiction
  • #61 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

More About the Author

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into forty-two languages. The most recent of his many honours is the Franz Kafka Prize.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

147 of 166 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Review from a long time fan, October 25, 2011

By 

las cosas (Ajijic-San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 1Q84 (Hardcover)

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.

247 of 283 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Don't think too hard about this stuff. This is the magnificent world of a picaresque novel", October 25, 2011

By 

Shashank Singh (Lawrence, KS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 1Q84 (Hardcover)

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.

206 of 240 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Cue Over-dramatic Self-realization..., November 23, 2011

By 

Chris Fiorillo (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: 1Q84 (Hardcover)

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!