1Q84

Amazing novel, but not for first timers.

I've read almost all of Murakami's fiction (short stories & novels), and after all the waiting around I can say without a doubt that this novel exceeded my expectations. It looks huge, but it's hard to put down.

If you've never read Murakami before though, I would say to start with one of his shorter novels. It's definitely more for those who are familiar with his style already.

15 out of 19 people found this review helpful.

Murakami is a genius

I previously had only read short stories by Haruki Murakami, so reading him in this longer form was amazing. Some authors can't seem to go between short and long forms so I had some trepidation. But this is beautifully surreal while still keeping his wonderful economy of language. (Which may also be a tribute toward the translators.) I loved every page and can heartily recommend it.

15 out of 16 people found this review helpful.

Interesting, but hardly "intricately plotted"

Before reading this I scanned some reviews that described the work as an intricately plotted masterpiece. I should confess that I am brand new to Murakami Haruki.

I enjoyed the book. However, it does not need to be 1,040 pages long--its length is not due to any sort of an intricate plot. The plot is no more complex than that of a typical Robert B. Parker novel, in my opinion. The length is due to copious description of everything from putting a record on a turntable to the clothing/appearance of various characters. Interestingly, in the book the editor makes a point to Tengo that in writing, what is important is to clearly and carefully describe what the reader has never experienced, and to spend less time describing what the reader knows well. I think this is interestingly because Murakami himself flagrantly violates this "rule" (of course, it is not his own rule, clearly, but that of one of his fictional characters).

Anyway, I did enjoy the book. I lived in Japan for a while, so particularly enjoyed Japanese aspects and familiar (to me) settings used in the book. I appreciated his specificity of location. It is rare for me to read a book that is set in a place I know well, so that was fun for me.

If you want a good mystery, read The Beekeeper's Apprentice instead!

I don't think I will seek out further reading material by this author, however ...

9 out of 12 people found this review helpful.

This is an omnibus translation of a powerful epic trilogy

Thirty year old Aomame caught the cab in Kuta heading inbound towards Tokyo. However, an accident shuts down the expressway. The cabby suggests Aomame whose name means green peas to try something different. Bored the passenger agrees; she leaves the taxi stuck on the elevated highway traffic jam to walk down stairs into a rabbit hole.

Thirty tears old Tengo the bored math teacher is the ghostwriter for teenage girl Fuka-Eri's bestseller Air Chrysalis. He too disappears.

Aomame realizes she is not in her Tokyo as the cops are uniformed and supplied with different guns; she calls her new land 1Q84. Though she wonders how to go home, an animated Aomame becomes involved in criminal activity. Meanwhile Tengo obsesses on a quest to find his childhood friend Aomame before the rules that she apparently is shattering in this Tokyo turns into pandemic chaos while the Sakigake cult hunt for this infamous female.

This is an omnibus translation of a powerful epic trilogy as Haruki Murakami explores the degrees of connection and separation between people within an Alice-Orwellian Tokyo. The story line is fascinating as the plot purposely meanders as it mirrors relationships. Still readers will enjoy Tengo's quest to save Aomame from her becoming the trend setter on her 1Q84 world.

Harriet Klausner

9 out of 18 people found this review helpful.

Meh

I kept waiting to be surprised; something to tie the ends together. In the final pages, I had downgraded my hopes: some clever twist to banish the thought that I¿d wasted so much time reading this tome with the plot of a shampoo bottle. Nope. I could summarize the story in a few paragraphs sufficiently and not give the ending away; because nothing happens. The book just ends and you get your life back.

7 out of 12 people found this review helpful.

great!

ill be honest and say i ofcourse am not complete with this novel yet but so far it is very similar to his other works yet some say it is the great culmination of all of his ideas. it is interesting that he incorporates classical music alot in his novels, as well as michael jacksons songs "billy jean". its almost as if all of his books are within the same universe but each new one is a different episode. makes for a unique and compellingly entertaining experience.

6 out of 10 people found this review helpful.

Unbelievable imagination!

This author is something else to have come up with such an extreme and complicated world. This has it all, love, romance, excitement, suspense, wonderment....This will not disappoint with many surprises and questions to find the answers to. Wow!

5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

If you enjoy repetition, this is the book for you!

I'm about 2/3 of the way through this book, and I feel like I've been reading it all my life. Is it worth it? I don't know yet. 1/6/2012 update: No, it wasn't worth it. I realize that I am in the minority here, but in my humble opinion, this book is highly overrated. I felt like I was reading the same passages, over and over and over. I got so sick of reading redundant descriptions of the two moons that I wanted to just toss the book. Unfortunately, my 'book' is a Nook, so I wasn't about to toss it. But getting back to the book, if I had to come up with one word to describe it, it would be 'repetitive'. The plot, as it was, just dragged on and on and on. With respect to characters, the only one I could sympathize with at all was Tengo, but not enough to really care whether he and Aomame got reunited. I'm not sure why I continued reading this book, except that I kept hoping it would surely have some fantastic ending that made it all worth it. Not!
I should say that this is my first Murakami book, and other readers warned against that. But I soldiered on. If it were not for other reviews I've read, this would be my first and last Murakami. But there are other reviewers who are Murakami fans who were disappointed in this particular book and recommended others. So Because of some of those reviews, I may try him again. I'm just not up to it right now.
This book might make a good book club selection, because readers seem to have extreme views of it one way or another, but my guess is that some readers would not finish it. I'm not sure why I did.

3 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

What is Reality?

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is a fic­tional novel which takes place between two worlds. The book was orig­i­nally writ­ten in Japan­ese and became a best seller almost immediatiy..

Aomame, a young assas­sin on her way to prac­tice her pro­fes­sion, steps out of a taxi cap and started notic­ing small but sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences in the world around her. Aomame real­izes that she entered a par­al­lel uni­verse which she calls 1Q84.

At the same time Tengo, an aspir­ing author, takes on a ghost­writ­ing project and becomes so wrapped up with the work and its author when he starts notic­ing that his world has become unraveled.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is not a com­plex novel, but it is long. The book asks an impor­tant ques­tion ¿what is reality¿?

I¿ve worked with many mar­ket­ing peo­ple over the years, the one impor­tant les­son they have taught me is the ¿per­cep­tion is every­thing, real­ity is noth­ing¿. At first, my struc­tured mind that sees the world in 0s and 1s couldn¿t com­pre­hend what they were say­ing. How­ever, with a lit­tle bit of con­tem­pla­tion I came to real­ize that they were right.

After all, we live in a fake world. The news we watch are fake, the food we eat is fake (that¿s why many immi­grants have their own food stores), the promises made to us by our lead­ers and cap­tains of indus­try are hol­low and bro­ken almost with­out delay.

Murakami points out that one¿s per­spec­tive often deter­mines what real­ity is for them, whether or not it is real­ity for oth­ers ¿ I think he¿s right. The author points out that the year 1984 no longer exists, it is not a par­al­lel uni­verse or or another world:

"For you and for me, the only time that exists any­more is this year of 1Q84"

The novel inter­twines two nar­ra­tives, Aomame who is a full-time trainer/ part-time assas­sin and Tengo, a math teacher and nov­el­ist. Aomame and Tengo, whose sto­ries even­tu­ally join, see the world in a par­al­lel uni­verse, each one with its own minor dif­fer­ences (police uni­forms for exam­ple) but they con­tinue to live with those who are in their own world.

The small dis­tinc­tions make all the dif­fer­ence to Aomame and Tengo in pur­su­ing their mean­ing & their per­sonal quests.

How­ever, the real strength of the book is the epic struc­ture in which it is writ­ten in and the ref­er­ences to lit­er­a­ture, world­wide and Japan­ese, and his­tor­i­cal events which I found amus­ing. I only wish the trans­la­tors (Jay Rubin & Philip Gabriel, who did an excel­lent job by the way) would have been kind enough to put in some foot­notes about the cul­tural aspects of the book to put it in per­spec­tive to those who are not up to date on cul­tural details as Mr. Murakami is.
But that is my com­plaint on most trans­lated books.

The won­der­ful thing about 1Q84 is that it is clear that Murakami is hav­ing fun with his com­ments

3 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

900 Empty Pages

A book of this length should reward you with more than a simple love story and strange settings. Mental chewing gum. Bloated and in need of a good editor. Spend your time reading Proust or Orwell not 1Q84.

1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

great read --- every single last 1040 nook pages of it

just finished 1Q84 and it is a terrific and mesmerizing read from beginning to end. At times an fantasy and at other times a spectacular page turning "what happens next" thriller of epic proportions. Sorry to see it come to an end, frankly

1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Great story but too much filler

1Q84 is well written and the actual storyline was great as were the characters but the book got nowhere fast. The first 300-400 pages were hard to get through, I kept drifting off and thinking about other things, there was just too much filler and not enough story. Had I purchased just the first book vs buying the book that contained all 3, I would've returned it without finishing. That being said, when he actually gets down to the business of telling the story it is awesome. If you can hang on, you may actually enjoy the book, as I ultimately did.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

My first Murakami's fiction. Definitely will not be my last. Ex

My first Murakami's fiction. Definitely will not be my last. Exciting from start to finish. Long but worth it.

1Q84 was originally released overseas as a three book set(books

1Q84 was originally released overseas as a three book set(books 2 and 3 sold in one volume)and became an international sensation. It was released here in the states as one book encompassing all three. It is a monster of a book whose characterization and steady pacing drive the story and reader along. You will devour this book as it devours you.
It begins simply enough with a traffic jam in Tokyo, the year 1984, a quiet young business woman by the name of Aomame (like the green peas she says)is stranded and running late for an appointment. The Taxi driver offers her a solution, on the overpass, off to the side is a walkway used by technicians and city workers, if she gets out and climbs down she can get to the street and take the city transit. This simple act, sets the whole tale in motion. Aomame in climbing down the stairwell enters a new and different world, a paralell to the the Tokyo she thinks she knows and into the Tokyo of 1Q84.
Elsewhere, a young teacher and frustrated writer named Tengo gets an offer from his editor to re-write a teenage girls first novel and improve it so it could win a contest and sell for the publisher. This act sets in motion the novel Air Chrysalis and like carefully plotted dominoes, all the rest falls into motion.
There is religious persecution, religious cults, sexual abuse and sexual freedom, a desire for revenge and tremendous sorrow. Crimes are committed and punished. There are triumphs and there is intense defeat and no one really gets away from 1Q84.
But at the center of it all is the one thing missing throughout this tale. There is no love. The one emotion in 1Q84 that none of the characters seem to have and it is the abscense of this emotion that drives this tale on. For in a moment, when they were children, Tengo and Aomame touched briefly and each felt that foriegn unknown sensation called pure love. They would spend their lives and this incredible story looking for the way to get that moment back as adults.
In the end this tale is about Tengo and Aomame and no matter how sad or damaged they may seem you will always want them to get free of 1Q84 and find that moment of their love for one another again.

it IS as captivating as its title! Brilliant read!

How DOES Murakami do it??!! A book for people who are able to dream in color! Great book for discussions! Yes, the rules are bent and it is enigmatic and keeps your ears pricked forward. Not predictable and I still think about it even though I've long finished it. Makes you dig deeper into your self (well it did for me). Just a glance of the cover caught my eye. I read the whole cover, the author's deep eyes looked straight into my core as if he knew something secret about me...whatever the magic is about this book on the outside it completely engulfed me once i started reading it. I could not put it down and when I did, all I did was think about the story. I felt as if I WAS in 1Q84!! It will carried me along on edge sometimes at other times I felt as if I were watching a movie or if I was IN the movie. hard to explain but I totally identified with Aomame and the dowager and Tengo and Tamaru and...well IT drew me in right away. First I was curious and then it builds and falls up and down and in and out...real or fantastic? It is a marvelous story-makes me wonder if it's not a story, but rather a glimpse of a skewed reality that exists on our 'flipside'. So, "put a tiger in your tank" and read this wonderful novel! I'm going to buy the audio book too!! That should be awesome to have it read to me! This is my new favorite book-story-novel!! Yeah-my NEW FAVORITE AUTHOR...HARUKI MURAKAMI. I want to try all his books now! THIS WOULD BE THE MOVIE OF ALL MOVIES! No kidding!!

The Emperor's New Clothes

I have read almost everything Murakami has written, and based on previous experience bought this one with high hopes. 100 pages in, I kept thinking that it would get better, but it never did. Interestingly, one of the main plot lines (although not the underlying main one) is about writing, ghost-writing and editing a novel. Unfortunately, Mr. Murakami did not have his protagonist to re-write this novel. While in keeping with Murakami's style, this book fails on every level. Too long, too tedious, juvenile in it's treatment of plot and in particular the adolescence of the sex-scenes. I only hope, for Mr. Murakami's sake, that the quality of the novel was lost in the translation. It will be a long time before I pick up another of his books.

A different read, not so much a story but a tracendence into the characters lives

Not a traditional storyline. I felt that I received more of a feeling from this book, instead of being told an actual story. You understand the characters from a deeper perspective, instead of seeing them going through their lives, you are able to be part of them.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Recommended, although a bit too long-a real teaser w/ great characters

I'm a big fan and have read most, if not all, of what Murakami has written. I found this story a bit too long, with lots of redundancies. Yet, he always keeps me interested in the characters and the philosophical teases. I was particularly struck by one paragraph on page 775, in which Aomame describes what it is like to read Proust. To my mind, Murakami seems to be describing his own style of writing and his imagined reader: "It's not boring, though,'she said.' It's so detailed and beautifully written, and I feel like I can grasp the structure of that lonely little planet. But I can't seem to go forward. It's like I'm in a boat, paddling upstream. I row for a while, but then when I take a rest and am thinking about something, If find myself back where I started., Maybe that way of reading suits me now, rather than the kind of reading where you forge ahead to find out what happens. I don't know how to put it exactly, but there is a sense of time wavering irregularly when you try to forge ahead. If what is in front is behind, and what is behind is in front, it doesn't really matter, does it.. Either way is fine." This story takes place in 1984 and 1Q84 (or cat town) but I notice a reference to the film 2001, which kinda threw me off. Anyway, if you are new to Murakami, you might want to try Wild Sheep Chase or one of his earlier works to see if you like his style. I certainly do!

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