Review: 1Q84

 I previously bounced off 1Q84, but after reading about Harukami talking about it about his first attempt at a really long novel (over 1000 pages!) I decided to give it a chance and this time it stuck. I've complained about Norweigian Wood not feeling very Japanese because of all its literary and musical references. However, 1Q84 struck me as being very Japanese despite having similar literary and musical references to Western music and media.

1Q84 strikes me as being in the same sensibility as Weathering With You or Your Name. Both Japanese movies have male and female protagonists who are separated in time or space, and who live in an alternate world/timeline where fantastical events/circumstances can happen. As with those movies, there's no explanation, no rationality for why these fantastical elements exist, but it does, and the connection between the protagonists are very light, almost to the point of randomness.

Aomame is a female assassin (one who is dispatched to silently kill men who abuse women). Tengo is a cram school math teacher who's trying to write a novel on the side. The link between them was that they went to elementary school together, and Tengo showed Aomame kindness at one point in 5th grade.

The plot starts when Aomame discovers that the world she's living in is subtly shifted from what she's grown up with --- the police are carrying different weapons, there's discussion about a moon base, and intriguingly, there are two moons in the sky, but she appears to be the only one who sees the second moon.

The chapters in the novel alternate between Aomame and Tengo, though in the last 3rd of the book a 3rd viewpoint is introduced. We gradually see the two threads come together. The pace of the book is slow, and especially in the last 3rd, you wonder if Harukami is deliberately prolonging the book as though he's getting paid by the word. Most of the supernatural stuff is unexplained --- you're just asked to accept it. The characters' resolutions are satisfying, though the 3rd viewpoint near the end of the book seems superfluous.

I read the book to the end, and to be fair the resolution of the alternate world hypothesis was strongly hinted at all through the novel, and you come to the end of the novel and are not surprised by the ending and thinking that it was an unfair mystery. The book definitely could have been much tighter edited and a lot of the extraneous stuff felt more or less superfluous, or "inefficient" as Harukami would describe in his essays.

Still, any 1000 page novel that can get me to finish it in a couple of weeks is probably of above average quality.