… Murakami’s most elaborate and sustained riff yet on themes he has reworked for thirty years: solitude, thwarted desire, Japan’s (and humankind’s) latent violent streak, the shadow of mortality, the shape of time, the elusiveness of the self, the malleability of reality … 1Q84 induces a quintessentially Murakamian vertigo—the past seeps into the present, cause and effect become scrambled, and the characters are swept along by forces beyond their control and comprehension. The most potent of these forces is fiction. 1Q84 is rife with stories-within-stories, and some of these stories, once told, can warp reality, or literally change the world … The microfictions planted throughout 1Q84 are like little time bombs, detonating not on impact but later, unexpectedly, as they take on new resonances or intersect with other narratives. More than any Murakami novel to date, 1Q84 is fiction about the power of fiction—a metafictional experiment that has the effect of a spell.
In this book, Murakami, who is nothing if not ambitious, has created a kind of alternative world, a mirror of ours, reversed … At one point, a character argues against the existence of a parallel world, but the two main characters in 1Q84 (Q=‘a world that bears a question’) are absolutely convinced that they live not in a parallel world but in a replica one, where they do not want to be … What’s fascinating about 1Q84 is its ambivalence about ‘the logic of reality’ and its wish to plunge the reader into the ‘far greater power’ of Unreality’s unlogic, which has the advantage of revolutionary fervor and reformism.
Somehow all of it — Tengo, Fuka-Eri, the book they created together, Aomame, and the dowager who hires Aomame to kill abusive men — is connected … Murakami’s characters, too, live their lives in time. Not the artificially compressed narrative time of a shorter novel or most movies, but the regular, stop-and-start time of actual life, which sometimes drags and sometimes even just seems to go around in circles … It is an exhilarating idea: not two worlds, side by side, but just one, swallowing itself, turning itself inside out, becoming the world that it isn’t, while still being the one that it is. The world as a self-revising document. To have even reached for this — to have articulated the idea well enough — is admirable. To have actually gotten ahold of it and conveyed it to the effect that Murakami has in 1Q84 is a feat of remarkable imagination.
For all its superb moments, 1Q84 feels uncontrolled, erratic and repetitive: it is threadbare where it should be plush, and overstuffed where it should be streamlined. The writing, meanwhile, veers from exquisite to slapdash to simply embarrassing … 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 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.
You, sucker, will wade through nearly 1,000 uneventful pages while discovering a Tokyo that has two moons and is controlled by creatures that emerge from the mouth of a dead goat. These creatures are called Little People … 1Q84 has even [Murakami’s] most ardent fans doing back flips as they try to justify this book’s glaring troubles. Is it consistently interesting? No, but Mr. Murakami is too skillful a trickster to rely on conventional notions of storytelling … It used to be customary, in a book of this magnitude, to explain unanswered questions and tie up loose ends. Mr. Murakami clearly rejects such petty obligations, and he leaves many of the parallels in 1Q84 cryptic and dead-ended.
1Q84’s first 600 pages are an imposing display of narrative engineering. Information is dispensed in a controlled, thrifty manner; tropes from high and low culture are handled with easy showmanship; further plotlines and curlicues are effortlessly thrown out … however, the last third of the book is a let-down, with all the narrative tension coming from the question of how long Murakami can keep throwing up obstacles to the long-promised Tengo-Aomame reunion … A lot of the social satire and criticism – on cults, on attitudes to women and sex, on competitions for first-time writers as mass media events – loses force outside its original context. As always, the experience is a bit like watching a Hollywood-influenced Japanese movie in a version that’s been dubbed by American actors.
Once you start reading 1Q84, you won’t want to do much else until you’ve finished it. Murakami possesses many gifts, but chief among them is an almost preternatural gift for suspenseful storytelling … The world has ‘switched tracks,’ and [Aomame] has entered a kind of parallel reality, which she eventually dubs 1Q84. Not much seems terribly different at first, but gradually she learns that certain aspects of history (and cosmology) have changed, and that nearly all these changes are linked to a mysterious commune called Sakigake … Despite its great length, Murakami’s novel is tightly plotted, without fat, and he knows how to make dialogue, even philosophical dialogue, exciting.
By climbing down those exit stairs, [Aomame] seems to put the world of 1984 behind her and enter a time that she comes to identify as 1Q84, an alternate realm and thus, the Q that bears a question … Murakami's main characters find themselves drawn toward each other as irresistibly, magnetically, hypnotically, soulfully as well as physically, in ways just as powerful as any characters in contemporary Western fiction. Despite the novel's enormous length, I felt the same attraction.
Murakami evokes a fully articulated vision of a not-quite-nightmare world, in which reality goes its own way and we have no choice but to adapt … Aomame and Tengo function equally as characters and as embodiments of the novel's larger themes, its essences — although it is to Murakami's credit that, whatever else they are, we never lose sight of these characters as flesh-and-blood beings … The truest pleasures of the book may be the most writerly, primarily its epic sense of structure (which functions as something of a fun-house mirror, endlessly reflective) and its many references to history and literature … 1Q84 is a big, sprawling novel, a shaggy dog story to be sure, but it achieves what is perhaps the primary function of literature: to reimagine, to reframe, the world.
1Q84 mostly describes the long, slow process by which Tengo and Aomame, who knew each other as schoolchildren, seek to reunite. Never was a love story so overpopulated with hardcore isolates, people who have severed ties to family, maintaining a cool distance from friends and lovers while investing their identities in the rigorous pursuit of some personal cause or obsession … This faith in the significance of Tengo and Aomame’s bond makes 1Q84 warmer than some of Murakami’s other ‘big’ novels … Translation is at the center of what Murakami does; not a translation from one tongue to another, but the translation of an inner world into this, the outer one. Very few writers speak the truths of that secret, inner universe more fluently.
Mr. Murakami's infinite patience in revealing the secret connections between Tengo's and Aomame's lives has the benefit of charging quite banal scenes with an aura of unearthly import. But it can also seem stubbornly vague, as many of the novel's most nagging questions are left unanswered …. Among the many paradoxes that Mr. Murakami inhabits is the ability to be both over-explanatory and enigmatic at the same time. Despite the allegorical role that the Little People play, the novel is covered in a veil of mystery because we never learn precisely how they operate … There is something fundamentally insubstantial about Mr. Murakami's work. You tend to forget the books the moment you finish them, and this is no less true after an immense production like 1Q84...Mr. Murakami's books are wrapped in a cocoon—or an air chrysalis—of cultural amnesia. It's one last paradox: They are themselves too empty to say anything meaningful about emptiness.
All the usual Murakami elements are there: the detached protagonist, the creepy authoritarian cult, the mysterious quest, the moments when the bizarre bleeds into the buttoned-up world of modern Japan. Yet too often the words simply lay there on the page—all 932 of them. The effort feels all too forced, as if Murakami set out to write something that simply approximated a great novel … 1Q84 unwinds as a result of its looping plot. There are still wonderfully Murakami-esque moments...but what I missed in this long-awaited Murakami novel was Murakami himself. With 1Q84, the author decided for the first time in his career to fully abandon first-person narration, and the absence is felt.
Murakami likes to blur the boundaries of reality, and in this sense 1Q84 is his most intricate work. The novel alternates between Tengo’s and Aomame’s stories and as the plot progresses, events draw the two of them together. Yet throughout the novel the line between 1984 and 1Q84, and between Aomame’s story and the fictionalized story of Air Chrysalis remains ambiguous, making it unclear whether it’s even possible for the two characters to meet … In 1Q84 Murakami makes several direct statements about the nature and methods of fiction, which begin to explain why he chooses to layer worlds on top of each other (and also add to the sense that 1Q84 is intended as the definitive work of the author’s career).
With this bravura and memorable opening, Haruki Murakami’s vast, ambitious but flawed novel of everything, 1Q84, leaves the flat-earth world of conventional fiction and begins the long, sometimes thrilling and entertaining, slog to the far distant end of some 900 beautifully written and translated pages … Murakami, though, is a wizard. Using a technique familiar to his loyal readers around the world, Murakami, developing his theme of duality and reflected identities, alternates the narrative’s point of view chapter by chapter. He is convincingly inside Aomame’s head, then Tengo’s, and in Book 3 adds the dogged and froggish detective Ushikawa — only then does the novel finally achieve lift-off … And yet. The magic and promise of the opening chapter...is not sustained over the many miles in the long-distance flight of this novel ... it staggers under its own weight, never quite leaving the orbit of this flat earth.
Murakami’s trademark plainspoken oddness is on full display in this story of lapsed childhood friends Aomame and Tengo, now lonely adults in 1984 Tokyo, whose destinies may be curiously intertwined … 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.
1Q84, like Murakami's other novels, is a remarkable book in which outwardly simple sentences and situations snowball into a profound meditation on our own very real dystopian trappings … Murakami clearly appreciates that Orwell matters now more than ever. 1984 serves as a kind of guiding light here, in large part because that novel seems to have predicted every element of our current surveillance state … What makes the world of 1984 so terrifying is how subtly it mirrors and mimics our own world. That's also true of 1Q84 … More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world, and he's not afraid to incorporate elements of surrealism or magical realism as tools to help us see ourselves for who we really are.
