📚 Finished reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami .
I scraped this one in on the last day of 2024. Anything for my book target (which I still failed).
This is actually a trilogy, 3 books in one, although I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them sold in separate volumes. This makes it very long; around 1300 pages depending on your edition. But it made enough of the “best books” lists in the past that I forced myself to not be put off by that fact.
Our heroine, Aomame, climbs down a highway’s emergency staircase in order to try and get out of the traffic jam and make her rather unusual business appointment. But she descends into something a bit more unusual than your typical road. The world shifts a little, almost unnoticeably at first - but one night she notices that she’s looking at a sky with two moons in it. It’s no longer the standard world of 1984 that she knows, so she switches out the 9 and christens her new locale, a world filled with questions, as 1Q84.
This made me realise that I had misread the title for the longest time, thinking it said IQ84. Whoops.
The year was apparently picked as a deliberate call-back to Orwell’s extremely famous novel 1984. Some parallels are there, but presented in an entirely different way, subtle enough to miss. There’s a powerful and secretive force controlling the world in both - Big Brother vs the Little People. History is rewritten. Most people don’t seem to realise what’s going on, that something is different to what is presented on the surface. Our two protagonists are deeply in love but kept away from each other. IQ84 even directly Orwell’s work at least once. But IQ84 is less obviously a work of political dystopia, and it ends a lot more hopefully. If you hated 1984 you could still easily love this.
Back to the story: Tengo is a guy she went to primary school with and hasn’t seen since, despite them both feeling a special connection with each other. He also finds himself in this new world. He’s a writer and find himself involved in a cunning plot to rewrite a story created by a 17-year old girl called Fuka-Eri, who has an association with a cult called Sakigate, such that it wins her a literary prize.
Of course Aomame and Tengo slowly find themselves drawn together into each other’s lives and plot lines. IQ84 can be a surreal world, where nothing is quite what it seems, and seeming coincidences abound. Most people haven’t noticed. But these two have.
It’s a pretty epic tale, and not just in page count. I found it highly gripping, very imaginative and enjoyed feeling the mystery along with the protagonists. The language is of a somewhat unusual style, with repeated phrases that somewhat stick out as slightly unnatural. The book is a translation so perhaps it’s that, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it’s deliberate. I found it novel and refreshing.
I understand that the ending has left some readers unsatisfied, and sure, there are fundamental curiosities left unresolved. But to be honest I’m not sure how one would neatly sum up this grand adventure of magical realism in any satisfying way. Perhaps sometimes we just have to live with mystery. I’m very glad to have experienced it.
