Book Review: "1Q84" by Haruki Murakami

Hi everyone!

What can one say about best-selling Japanese author Haruki Murakami's latest opus, the futuristic 1Q84?

1. It sucks you in from the first page and keeps you in its thrall, greedily turning over 900 pages to find out what's going to happen next.
2. It is populated by a cast of characters unlike any you've read in fiction at any recent time: each beautifully drawn without being overly descriptive.
3. It gives the reader a keen appreciation of and an introduction to the urban sprawl that is modern day (or should I say post-modern day) Tokyo.
4. It contains one of the most bizarre (not to mention perverse) sex scenes (or is it a sex scene?) between an older man and a child (children) one is likely to encounter in world literature.
5. It inspires the reader to listen to Janacek's "Sinfonietta" (it pays to be familiar with this classical piece because it plays a rather important role in the novel) and at least attempt to read Proust's "In Search of Lost Time."
6. It poses more questions than it answers: like what exactly is an Air Crystalis and who (or what) are the Little People?
7. It has Little People (literally...these are one of the novel's most baffling creations, see above)
8. It gives the reader an increasingly sinking sense (somewhere around page 700) that the ending is going to be less than the sum of its parts.
9. It ultimately disappoints and yet...somehow one can't help but admire the audacity of Murakami's storytelling.
10. Huh?

Don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed this novel. I couldn't put it down even as my wrists started to ache from holding this doorstop of a book and, as I mentioned above, I started to realize that after 900-plus pages, there's still so much that doesn't really add up. I wonder if Murakami is planning to write a sequel?

Briefly, 1Q84 tells the parallel stories of two thirty year-old Tokyo residents living in the year 1984: Aomame is a fitness instructor who escaped from her parent's religious cult when she was a young girl and has grown up to live a rather reclusive life, teaching a particularly brutal exercise/stretching class when she's not acting as an assassin; and Tengo, a somewhat hermetic part-time cram school math teacher who moonlights as a fiction ghostwriter with literary aspirations of his own. One day, en route to an assassination, Aomame is sitting in a cab on a Tokyo expressway stuck in rush hour traffic. Janacek's Sinfonietta is playing on the radio. Aomame is in a hurry. The cab driver suggests she get out and walk down an emergency staircase coming off of the expressway ramp if she hopes to make her appointment on time. Aomame does and, after a series of bizarre events including the discovery that the Earth now has two moons, she finds herself in an alternative reality called 1Q84. Meanwhile, Tengo has been hired by his editor to rewrite a novella called Air Crystalis by Fuka-Eri, a mysterious seventeen year-old autistic-seeming girl, in order to submit it for a literary prize. The novella becomes an instant best-seller which causes a whole host of problems for everyone involved, not the least of which is that the teenage author Fuka-Eri is another escapee (like Aomame) from a religious cult hell-bent on preserving its rather unsavory secrets. Added to this mix is Ushiwara, de-barred former lawyer with frightful looks and a moss-covered tongue who sets out on his own obsessive investigation of Tengo, Aomame, and Fuka-Eri. 

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Over the novel's 900 pages, the reader is treated to all manner of interweaving narratives, violence, sexual perversion, literary and musical references, the ritualized abuse of young girls for the sake of religious fulfillment, a comic though scary off-camera NHK fee collector who may or may not be the spirit of a comatose character, action-packed set pieces, a kidnapping, rambling semi-philosophical dialogue that occasionally reads like deliberate excursions into dead-ends, semi-celestial entities named "Maza" and "Dohta" (mother and daughter), and (my personal favorite) an Immaculate Conception that more-or-less ties at least two of the main narrative threads together. The result is a thrilling yet ultimately unsatisfying novel that goes around in circles and ends in a manner that is wholly appropriate yet frustratingly disappointing. Nothing is explained. As I turned the final page, I felt as though I had just endured (albeit willingly) a very elaborate and beautifully constructed April Fool's joke. In other words, I felt a bit like I'd been had.

And yet...and yet...1Q84 is a novel that I will return to and reread, probably not any time soon, but it's definitely on the list., right up there with War and Peace.  Does 1Q84 really exist? What's the significance of the two moons? What exactly is an air crystalis? And who (or what) are the Little People?