Read Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 ✅

3% complete

If you love tightly-crafted storylines…

If you love mysteries that are satisfactorily explained by the end…

If you love reading about fully fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters…

…well, if you love those things and only those things, Murakami’s not your guy.

However, if you’re okay with none of the above, and you don’t mind spending your time feeling lost in a hypnotic daydream where things are just close enough to realistic to be believed—in that case, 1Q84 should jump to the top of your TBR list.

1Q84 was my fourth Murakami novel, preceded by The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, and Norwegian Wood. Of the three of those, my favorite is Wind-Up Bird, also the weirdest, longest, and most frustrating. 1Q84 somehow manages to top it in all three categories. Wind-Up is still my favorite of the bunch, but I was just as happily lost in the hazy, ominous, obliquely sinister world of 1Q84 over the course of its 1100+ pages.

There are absolutely flaws with this book. A cursory search on Reddit or Goodreads will readily reveal them to you: gratuitous sexual elements; flat female characters; unresolved mysteries; frustrating pacing; entire storylines that seem wasteful and unnecessary.

If you can get past all of that, there is a world waiting for you with enough intrigue to sustain your attention through this absolute brick of a book. While the characters may not be deeply complex, Murakami explores their inner worlds in microscopic detail, making their actions in their strange world believable. The critics are right when they say the mysteries are never fully explained, but I think that’s by design. Like in Lost, the narrative does not exist to serve the mysteries; the mysteries, instead, serve as a backdrop for character exploration and development. Instead of being spoon-fed answers, the reader is left to ponder the questions long after finishing the book—for me, the latter is preferable.

I don’t want to spoil any of the narrative, but I’ll end with a synthesis of my favorite interpretations of one of the book’s major themes, which is that all of the strangeness of the world, and the mysterious, ambivalent forces therein represent the ways in which our moral failings, regrets, and traumas haunt us and alter the way we see the world. As somebody whose OCD can often place a subjective, funhouse-mirror filter over the objective, real world around me, I can empathize with characters who are made to get by in a world that is similar to but just different enough from the one they expect.

That’s all for now. Stay strong and fight on.

-K.