There are often books where you really can’t review it, you just have to tell people they need to trust you and read it. But when the book is 900+ pages, it’s often a hard sell. So, I will try to review Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, but do not believe that I will be successful in showing why this is an amazing book that should be read by everyone. But I will try. And it needs to be understood that this book isn’t about the plot. It’s about the characters and the setting and the atmosphere. So, let’s see what 1Q84 is.
The book has a small cast of characters and only 3 POV characters (2 for most of the novel and a third gets upgraded to a POV character about 2/3 of the way through the book). The book starts with Aomame, a young health instructor in a taxi that is stuck in a traffic jam while she is running late to a meeting. The driver mentions that there is a shortcut off to the side. She can go through an emergency exit, down a staircase and end up in the subway station. Aomame does this and makes it to her meeting on time. Her meeting is to kill a young man in a way that makes it look like a heart attack. Aomame works with an elderly lady who runs a battered wife shelter. She has Aomame work on eliminating some of the undesirable men who are abusing the women. After she takes her shortcut, she starts realizing that something changed in the world. Police officers now carry different weapons than she remembers and they changed them as a result of a giant shootout with a cult that she has no memory of either.
Our other major character is Tengo. Tengo grew up as the smartest and most athletic in his school, but was unhappy personally. He is mostly happy now teaching math at a cram school and doing writing on the side. An editor friend of his, Komatsu, brings Tengo a manuscript that was entered into a contest. The writing is stilted and not very polished, but the story is amazing. They hatch a plan to have Tengo polish the story up and submit it and this brings in the original author, Fuka-Eri, a seventeen year old girl who left a secretive commune where her parents still live.
The story starts to intertwine soon. The commune, we come to find out, is related to the cult that had the giant shootout. Tengo and Aomame went to school together and shared a moment when they were 10 that neither of them had forgiven. Then Aomame’s side assassin job leads her to the leader of the commune Fuka-Eri came from. Aomame and Fuka-Eri both go into hiding and Tengo’s father (who was in a nursing home) takes a turn for the worse and the third POV character (a detective named Ushikawa, who is investigating Fuka-Eri, Tengo and Aomame on behalf of the commune) is made more prominent (he had a small part earlier in the novel). The novel then starts taking us on a journey to bring Tengo and Aomame back together.
The plot is easily told, but it doesn’t really cover what the book is about. The book is about love and multiple universes and finding out what you really want to do with your life. It is a wonderful, magical book that slowly draws you into the characters and lets you live and breathe with them as they go through a turbulent time in a world with two moons and police officers with different guns. There are a lot of questions not answered, but they aren’t all answered and they aren’t always important. 1Q84 is an amazing book that proves that Haruki Murakami is one of the best writers around right now. Highly recommended.