Murakami's 1Q84 is a Wild, Bizarre, and Beautifully Written Ride

And, I finished.

About two months ago, I picked up 1Q84, Hideki Murakami's 1,200 page monolithic novel set in 1984 Tokyo and published initially in three parts over the course of 2009-10. Working as I do in a high school library, I have various times assigned to general supervision -- or "recess duty" as I like to call it -- when students are off class and hanging out or passing through the media center. I generally walk around the various spaces, and then park myself near a book shelf in the center and casually read while maintaining an "adult presence." And, I also have some times where I have to wait for students coming for tech assistance -- I don't get started with any projects because over the course of 10-15 minutes several times a day I will be interrupted numerous times. So I wait, and read.

I figured if I read a few pages, maybe a short chapter, over the course of the year, I'd be done sometime in the second semester. Well, it only took two months, and it was quite a fascinating literary treat. My wife is a serious Murakami fan, and I've never gotten into his novels, though I've truly enjoyed his two works of nonfiction, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running and his explanation of the life of a writer Novelist as a Vocation. So, I wasn't sure how I'd like this doorstop of a book -- but he had me hooked from page one in the slightly odd bit of casually dystopian magical realism about the story of ... well, two people searching for each other.

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

Murakami is quite a unique writer, I have learned, and there is something strangely compelling in this story that I appreciated in a way I hadn't expected. Critics of the book -- and they were vast when it was first published in English -- call out the use of cliche and the needless repetition in the story, but I wasn't bothered by either issue, and honestly saw repeated descriptions as a way of circling back around a puzzling situation mentally, looking for an angle. That's clearly an intentional choice.

It might be cliche to talk about novels as a way of "exploring the human condition," but I found the descriptions of the characters' individual histories and internal conflicts and personal battles and endless searching to be quite endearing, if not in a somewhat curious manner. And, again, I found my self dwelling on certain descriptions and scenes. I've heard that when Murakami first started writing, he wrote in English and then translated that back into Japanese, a style that was unfamiliar and strangely compelling to Japanese audiences. That may have been the key to his initial success. 

And it worked. And it has been working for decades.