1Q84 is another book by Haruki Murakami and is supposed to take inspiration from George Orwell’s novel, 1984, although I’ve never read that one so I can’t say for sure. It’s one of the longest books I’ve ever read, sitting around 1000, and really, I don’t think the length is justified. Like Kafka on the Shore, it’s a strange book; a lot of things happen. And at the same time, absolutely nothing occurs.
The story has two central protagonists, each chapter switching over to the other’s perspective. The first is Aomame, who is an assassin. This sounds pretty cool, but it’s not. The second is Tengo, an aspiring author. After being sent out of the world of 1984 and into the parallel world of 1Q84, the two get tangled up in murders, cults, and magical deities. My first impression of the book was positive. Chapter one was intriguing as it set up a mystery and potential for a cool story. But as time went on, I became increasingly disinterested in the plot. Because as I’ve already stated: absolutely nothing occurs.
Let me start with my biggest complaint about the book. There’s a lot of filler. Honestly this book only needs to be half as long as it is. So many chapters are describing things that don’t matter or will never be brought up again. Here’s what happens to Aomame: she kills a guy, kills the leader of a cult, and then goes into hiding for the rest of the book. In a nutshell, this is all that she does in the story. And yet, the story feels the need to describe everything that she does. About five whole pages are spent detailing how she’s mastered the art of kicking people in the balls and yet, we never get to see her do that. There’s a whole part where she becomes friends with a police officer which could provide some real drama and tension since she’s an assassin, but no. All they do together is pick up guys at the bar and that is boring. The police officer gets murdered, and to add insult to injury, her death is just sort of mentioned when Aomame is reading the newspaper. And even worse is the fact that her killer just sort of gets away with it. You never learn who killed her. It’s like the author just wanted her to die because he realized she had no relevance in the story in the first place.
Tengo is even worse. Writing a book is the only thing he does in the entire story; the rest of the book is just him going about his daily life. Again I’m cutting things out, but the things I’m cutting out don’t really matter in the first place. His dad has Alzheimer’s or something and lives in a nursing home. A huge chunk of the book is dedicated to fleshing out Tengo’s past and his rocky relationship with his father, and another huge chunk of it is spent wondering what happened to his mother and whether or not he really is the son of his father. And are either of these questions answered? NO. So why were they even brought up in the first place? And like the policewoman, Tengo’s dad just straight up dies. He isn’t even murdered, he just intentionally goes into a coma and says “peace out.”
Also, the characters suck. They’re not unlikable, but they’re so bland and forgettable. Aomame and Tengo have the personality of a paper bag. The only two characters that I liked are Komatsu and Tamaru, except both of them ever hardly show up. There’s also no character development at all. Aside from maybe Komatsu and maybe Ushikawa, every character feels the exact same as how they started. Character development is one hundred percent necessary for a good story (Back to the Future) but it does help, and the lack of character development just makes the many emotionally charged moments in the story feel unneeded since the characters don’t grow from them. Aomame spends only a page grieving over her police friend’s death and then the police officer is only mentioned three times after that point.
Like Kafka on the Shore, the book goes in some bizarre places but unlike Kafka on the Shore the bizarre parts are not the central focus, and because of this, it makes them feel out of place. For example, when Aomame is first transported to 1Q84 she starts noticing some inconsistencies how the world is supposed to be and after doing extensive research she realizes she’s been sent a parallel world. So what does she do after this? She goes to a bar and hits on some guys, and then she goes to a mansion and talks for a while with an old lady. The parallel world of 1Q84 is hardly ever talked about again. Other weird things include the Little People and air chrysalises. I think they’re supposed to be some sort of abstract supernatural phenomenon, sort of like The Shining. But I don’t know because the book doesn’t bother to explain them. And you could argue that it’s up to the reader’s imagination. And I could argue that it’s stupid. There’s a few things that I think make ambiguous things in stories work.
One: does not answering a mystery add to the story? In this case, I don’t think it does. Rather than it feeling natural for there to be no answer, it feels like the chapters answering the mysteries were ripped out of the book.
Two: can the reader figure out the author’s intent without it the answer needing to be spelled out? Again, the answer to this is no. The weird things seem to happen just for the sake of being weird; I never got the impression that the strange occurrences were correlated, or that they were clues to a bigger picture. Quite frankly, I don’t even think the author knows what the big picture behind 1Q84 is, and if the author doesn’t have a story planned, why should I bother trying to figure it out?
And finally, three: is being weird the point of the story? Is it the kind of story not meant to be analyzed? Is it the kind of story where you’re just supposed to turn your brain off and accept the mind boggling settings? No. Like I already said, the bizarre parts are not the central focus. At several points in the story the characters have deep discussions about anything and everything and it’s obvious the author wants this story to make you think deeply and question everything you know. But since there’s no plot, there’s nothing to think about. So when the characters start talking about whether or not time is a line, or Janáček’s Sinfonietta, or a bunch of old books I’ll never read, it just comes off as pretentious, as if the author is showing off how much he’s thought about time, or how he listens to obscure classical music (he liked to do this in Kafka on the Shore too), or how he reads a bunch of old obscure novels.
The plot is dumb and stupid and dumb. Here’s Aomame’s side of the story: she’s in a taxi. The traffic is bed so she gets out on the highway. Then she goes down some stairs. This is when she gets to 1Q84. Then she assassinates a guy. Then she goes to a bar. Then she becomes friends with a police officer and then she hangs out at a rich woman’s mansion. The rich woman’s daughter commit suicide I think because her husband was abusive. Angered by this she sets up her mansion as a refuge for abused women. She has a gay bodyguard named Tamaru. His dog blows up. Aomame does nothing for about a a hundred chapters. Then the rich woman wants to assassinate some guy. So Aomame assassinates him. Before the guy dies he exposition dumps a bunch of things about the Little People and Tengo. Then Aomame goes into hiding. Again, she does nothing for a million chapters. Then she’s pregnant. The pregnancy, like everything in this book, has no bearing on the story and it would be the exact same if it didn’t happen. Also, she gets pregnant due to magic. This is real. (Maybe the author had a pregnancy fetish.) Then Aomame finally meets Tengo. They go back to 1984. The end.
Again, I’ve left a lot of things out, such as Aomame’s backstory, but that’s because they don’t matter. Stripping away all the unnecessary fluff you start to see how boring this story is since nothing happens.
Now here’s Tengo’s side of the story. It’s not much better than Aomame’s. Tengo is meets up with his editor Komatsu and he tells him about a short story submitted by a 17 year old girl. He says the writing is crap but the premise is really good and he hatches a plan for Tengo to ghostwrite the story and polish it up a bit so they can make the best book of all time and also a lot of money. They meet with the girl. She agrees to the plan. Tengo meets with her guardian. He learns about her backstory which I won’t write down because it doesn’t matter. (Essentially, she was once part of a cult and ran away to live with her dad’s friend.) Tengo does nothing for a billion chapters. He finshes the book. It’s a massive success. Then he visits his dad. Then Komatsu goes missing. Then Komatsu comes back. Then Tengo’s dad dies. Then Komatsu explains that he got kidnapped by a cult. The cult wanted him to stop publishing the book since it turns out the 17 year old girl wrote the book to reveal the secret of the Little People and air chrysalises, exposing the cult. (Not that it mattered since nobody thinks the book is real, and in the end the cult is never exposed.) So he stops publishing the book. Then nothing happens. Then the 17 year old girl just disappears from the story, probably because the author didn’t need her anymore. Then nothing happens for a lot longer. Then Tengo gets a message to meet Aomame. They go back to 1Q84. The end.
This is the plot. This is what I had to endure 1000 pages of. Nothing. Happened.
The most egregious case of nothing happening is with Ushikawa. In the third act of the book he’s the third character introduced and now the book cycles through Aomame’s, Tengo’s, and Ushikawa’s perspective, so you would think he would be an important central character. Anyway, his plot is that he’s part of the cult and wants to track down Aomame for killing the leader, and so he stalks Aomame and Tengo for a while. And I do mean a while; his chapters are probably the longest and we have to see his backstory and his super long and tedious investigation. And what’s the payoff to all of this reading? Nothing. Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing. At the end he just gets assassinated by Tamaru before he can report to the cult. So why did we have to spend so long reading about him if nothing came out of it? Because the author wanted you to read about a sweaty old man staking out in an apartment, that’s why. I feel as if this entire book just exists to waste time.
This book took me about two months to read. I only read about two or three chapters a day. Any more than that and I would have just collapsed from boredom. The only reason I finished reading it was because I was already about halfway through and at that point I should just make it to the end. Had this book only been about four hundred pages, then I could have found it alright. Not good, just alright. But the book is bloated and has words with no intent behind them. There are many shorter books that say a lot more than 1Q84 does.
The next book I’ll be reviewing is A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. So far it’s been pretty interesting, although that was also my first impression of 1Q84, so I’ll just wait and see if it really is good.