1Q84
I hadn’t read a Murakami book for a long time, and I don’t even remember the title of it. Libby recommended this book as an available book and since I had long exhausted my to-reads list, picked it up.
1Q84 is about mirror worlds. There’s the regular world, that exists in 1984, and the mirror world 1Q84, where our protagonists end up. The story begins with a relative bang, where the female protagonists ends up in 1Q84 while stuck in a traffic jam becuase she had to exit the taxi she was in to get to an appointment on time. You find out almost immediately why she had to make it to her appointment in such a rushed manner (and also remind yourself why she couldn’t just call to delay her appointment because in 1984 the cell phone hasn’t been invented yet) - she is an assassin. The male protagonist on the other hand, is a writer who has been asked to ghostwrite an incomplete novel submitted by an amateur. He’s a bit hesitant at first, but acquiesces mostly because he wants to and also his editor brow beats him into doing it. How he ends up in 1Q84 from 1984 is a bit of a mystery and never gets cleared up.
Its a science fiction novel, but set almost exclusively in the 1980s and the only fantastical elements of the book are the alien/fantastical gnomes that only appear in an accounting by the amateur authoress whose book is being ghostwritten. There is almost as much description of the slice of life thing about the two protagonists, you will be intimately familiar with their sex life, what they eat, how they like to walk to the train station, and the such. The story does move along at a nice clipped pace despite these descriptions however, and I found myself blowing through the first of the three books quite quickly.
The story is told in chapter to chapter form whereby each chapter is from the perspective of each of the protagonist. This proceeds for the first 2 books, and then in the 3rd book, you get the perspective of a private investigator who is looking for the female protagonist because of one of her successful assassinations. This at first threw me into a loop, but I soon got used to it. Its just one more perspective to read through, but it does slow down the main story quite a bit.
I have to admit, I really admired the book because it was written so well. That japanese way of saying things without really saying things, or the exposition of a simply cooked meal of grilled fish, miso soup, and white rice with some preserved vegetables brings me a type of joy that is hard to describe. You wouldn’t expect 2 paragraphs about how these food are cooked to be in any way shape or form interesting, and yet, it is this type of detail that brings into close focus the main points of the story. That of long lost lovers, who vaguely aware of each other’s existence, never really sought each other out until the end. That of religion, that of complicated relationships with your parents. That of the surreal world and are we really all just cats or butterflies living in another world.
You can argue that nothing happens in the 1000 pages or so of story, or that a lot happens, but could have been cut down to 300 pages. You wouldn’t be wrong, but you’d also miss the slice of life that the author brings to life. It could be that I’m a little nostalgic for my idealization of 1984 itself, but really, I think this was a book I enjoyed becuase it was a lot ado about nothing but two lovers separated by time, space and another world, trying to find each other and the travails they go through.
Read the first book, if you enjoyed it, you’ll like to finish the trilogy. Otherwise skip. =)