1Q84 (Murakami)

Book Reviews
A book that...makes you marvel, reading it, at all the strange folds a single human brain can hold.... A grand, third-person, all encompassing meganovel. It is a book full of anger and violence and disaster and weird sex and strange new realities, a book that seems to want to hold all of Japan inside of it.... Murakami has established himself as the unofficial laureate of Japan—arguably its chief imaginative ambassador, in any medium, to the world: the primary source, for many millions of readers, of the texture and shape of his native country.... I was surprised to discover, after so many surprising books, that he managed to surprise me again.
Sam Anderson - New York Times Magazine

 
Murakami is clearly one of the most popular and admired novelists in the world today, a brilliant practitioner of serious, yet irresistibly engaging, literary fantasy.... Once you start reading 1Q84, you won’t want to do much else until you’ve finished it.... Murakami possesses many gifts, but chief among them is an almost preternatural gift for suspenseful storytelling.... Despite its great length, [his] novel is tightly plotted, without fat, and he knows how to make dialogue, even philosophical dialogue, exciting.... Murakami’s novels have been translated into a score of languages, but it would be hard to imagine that any of them could be better than the English versions by Jay Rubin, partnered here with Philip ­Gabriel.... There’s no question about the sheer enjoyability of this ­gigantic novel, both as an eerie thriller and as a moving love story.... I read the book in three days and have been thinking about it ever since.
Michael Dirda - Washington Post


[1Q84] is fundamentally different from its predecessors. We realize before long that it is a road. And what the writer has laid down is a yellow brick road. It passes over stretches of deadly desert, to be sure, through strands of somniferous poppies, and past creatures that hurl their heads, spattering us with spills of kinked enigma. But the destination draws us: We crave it, and the craving intensifies as we go along (unlike so many contemporary novels that are sampler menus with neither main course nor appetite to follow). More important, the travelers we encounter, odd and wildly disparate as they are, possess a quality hard to find in Murakami’s previous novels: a rounded, sometimes improbable humanity with as much allure as mystery. It is not just puzzlement they present, but puzzled tenderness; most of all in the two leading figures, Aomame and Tengo. Converging through all manner of subplot and peril, they arouse a desire in us that almost mirrors their own . . . Murakami makes us want to follow them; we are reluctant to relinquish them. Who would care about the yellow brick road without Scarecrow’s, Woodman’s and Lion’s freakiness and yearning? What is a road, particularly Murakami’s intricately convoluted road, without its human wayfarers?
Richard Eder - Boston Globe


Profound.... A multilayered narrative of loyalty and loss.... A fully articulated vision of a not-quite-nightmare world.... A big sprawling novel [that] achieves what is perhaps the primary function of literature: to reimagine, to reframe, the world....  At the center of [1Q84’s] reality...is the question of love, of how we find it and how we hold it, and the small fragile connections that sustain us, even (or especially) despite the odds.... This is a major development in Murakami’s writing.... A vision, and an act of the imagination.
David L. Ulin - Los Angeles Times

 
Fascinating.... A remarkable book in which outwardly simple sentences and situations snowball into a profound meditation on our own very real dystopian trappings.... One of those rare novels that clearly depict who we are now and also offer tantalizing clues as to where literature may be headed.... I’d be curious to know how Murakami’s yeoman translators Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel divided up the work...because there are no noticeable bumps in the pristine and deceptively simple prose.... More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world, and he’s not afraid to incorporate elements of surrealism or magical realism as tools to help us see ourselves for who we really are. 1Q84 is a tremendous accomplishment. It does every last blessed thing a masterpiece is supposed to—and a few things we never even knew to expect.
Andrew Ervin - San Francisco Chronicle
 

Do you miss the girl with the dragon tattoo? Do you long for the thrill of following her adventures again through three volumes of exciting, intelligent fiction? If so, I have good news for you. She’s got a sort of soul sister in one of the two main characters in Haruki Murakami’s wonderful novel 1Q84.... With more than enough narrative and intellectual heft to make it enjoyable for anyone with a taste for moving representations of modern consciousness in the magical realist mode, this story may easily carry you away to a new world and keep you there for a long time.... The deep and resonant plot...unfolds at a leisurely pace but in compelling fashion by luring us along with scenes of homicidal intrigue, literary intrigue, religious fanaticism, physical sex, metaphysical sex and asexual sex. And music.... Murakami’s main characters find themselves drawn toward each other as irresistibly, magnetically, hypnotically, soulfully and physically as any characters in Western fiction. Given the plain-spoken but appealing nature of the prose (translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel), most of you will feel that same power as an insinuating compulsion to read on, despite the enormous length, hoping against hope for a happy ending under a sky with either two moons or one. Two moons—two worlds—a girl with—900 pages—1Q84 is a gorgeous festival of words arranged for maximum comprehension and delicious satisfaction.
Alan Cheuse - NPR


1Q84 is one of those books that disappear in your hands, pulling you into its mysteries with such speed and skill that you don’t even notice as the hours tick by and the mountain of pages quietly shrinks.... I finished 1Q84 one fall evening, and when I set it down, baffled and in awe, I couldn’t help looking out the window to see if just the usual moon hung there or if a second orb had somehow joined it. It turned out that this magical novel did not actually alter reality. Even so, its enigmatic glow makes the world seem a little strange long after you turn the last page (Grade: A)
Rob Brunner - Entertainment Weekly

 
A 932-page Japanese novel set in Tokyo in which the words "sushi" and "sake"’ never appear but there are mentions of linguine and French wine, as well as Proust, Faye Dunaway, The Golden Bough, Duke Ellington, Macbeth, Churchill, Janaeek, Sonny and Cher, and, give the teasing title, George Orwell? Welcome to the world of Haruki Murakami.... A symmetrical and multi-layered yarn, as near to a 19th-century three-decker as it is possible to be.... The label of fantasy-realism has been stuck to it, but it actually has more of a Dickensian or Trollopian structure.... Explicit, yet subtle and dream-like, combining viciousness with whimsy...this is Murakami’s unflagging and masterful take on the desire and pursuit of the Whole.
Paul Theroux - Vanity Fair

 
Murakami’s new novel is the international literary giant at his uncanny, mesmerizing best.... The spell cast by Murakami’s fiction is formed in the tension between his grounded accounts of everyday life and the otherworldly forces that keep intruding on that life, propelling the characters into surreal adventures.... Translation is at the center of what Murakami does; not a translation from one tongue to another, but the translation of an inner world into this, the outer one. Very few writers speak the truths of that secret, inner universe more fluently.
Laura Miller - Salon


(Starred review.) Murakami’s trademark plainspoken oddness is on full display in this story of lapsed childhood friends Aomame and Tengo, now lonely adults in 1984 Tokyo, whose destinies may be curiously intertwined.... Murakami’s fans know that his focus has always been on the quiet strangeness of life, the hidden connections between perfect strangers, and the power of the non sequitur to reveal the associative strands that weave our modern world.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) At the core of this work is a spectacular love story about a girl and a boy who briefly held hands when they were both ten. That said, with the fiercely imaginative Murakami as author, the story’s exposition is gloriously labyrinthine. —Terry Hong
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Unquestionably Murakami’s most vividly imagined parallel world.... Gradually but inexorably, the tension builds.... When Murakami melds fantasy and realism, mystery and epic, it is no simple genre-bending exercise; rather, it is literary alchemy of the highest order. —Bill Ott
Booklist


(Starred review.) Ambitious, sprawling and thoroughly stunning . . . Orwellian dystopia, sci-fi, the modern world (terrorism, drugs, apathy, pop novels)—all blend in this dreamlike, strange and wholly unforgettable epic.
Kirkus Reviews