I am not normally a big fan of alternate world novels so when the three novels that make up 1Q84 were combined and translated into English I resisted the temptation to read it.  Still I saw a lot of interest in the novel and afraid that I may be missing out on something good, I took the plunge.

Here’s the basic plot of the book:  A woman named Aomame who happens to be a personal trainer and an assassin (and I have known a few folks who thought their personal trainer was trying to kill them), on the advice of a taxi driver, climbs down an emergency access stairway from an elevated highway in Tokyo.  Afterward she begins to sense slight changes in the world but she doesn’t know how they happened or what they mean.  She’s a good assassin, meaning she only assassinates those who were truly asking for it.  At the same time a man named Tengo is approached by a literary magazine editor to secretly rewrite a novel penned by a 17 year old girl because, while the plot of the story is good, the writing is crap.  Tengo and Aomame also happen to have gone to elementary school together and something as simple as Aomame grasping Tengo’s hand and staring into his eyes when they were ten years old enabled them to fall in love with each other and although they haven’t seen each other in twenty years they’re still stuck on each other.  Now the book Tengo rewrites is a big hit and the 17 year old “author”, Fuka-Eri is a sensation even though she’s socially inept.  But there’s a bigger problem than the fraud they’ve perpetrated on the literary world.  A mysterious religious cult – the same one from which Fuka-Eri ran away – is pissed about the book.  It seems the book, Air Chrysalis, divulges mysterious secrets involved in the religious cult – something about “Little People” coming out of a dead goat’s mouth in order to weave an air chrysalis that will create a sort of clone of someone and blah, blah…yeah, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me either. Meanwhile Aomame is assigned to kill a very bad man who has been raping pre-teen girls.  And she’s still thinking about Tengo and telling a friend that he’s the only one she’ll ever love but she won’t seek him out.  She’s rather wait until she bumps into him somewhere in all of Japan.

Well I don’t want to reveal much more of the plot lest I spoil it for any readers and because it’s such a twisted mess and there are so many dead end roads I simply don’t want to get started on.  And that’s one of my biggest gripes about 1Q84.  It’s author, Haruki Murakami, leads us down roads that don’t bring us anywhere.  The plot and it’s sub-plots weave in and out of each other but nothing is created.

Here are some of the things that irked me about 1Q84.

1.  Breasts.  Oh man, the breasts.  Murakami must be boob obsessed because virtually every female character introduced, no matter how minor, has her breasts described to us.  And if it’s a major character her breasts are described to us multiple times.  I believe I know more about Aomame’s breasts than I do about my own.  Oh let’s throw in the abundance of pubic hair descriptions as well while we’re at it.

2.  Repetition.  I understand that 1Q84 was originally written as a series of three novels and were combined when they were translated into English and some refreshing of the reader’s mind would be necessary but it was done to excess.  Tengo’s reoccurring daydream has to be described to us every time it’s mentioned, even though he stops having the daydream early on in the story.  The ugly private detective that appears about halfway through the book is described in the same way repeatedly.  Okay.  We get it.  He’s weird looking.  Let’s move on.

3.  Tedious description.  I like a descriptive book but I don’t need to know the look and condition of every article of clothing worn by a character.  I don’t need to know how every meal a character cooks is prepared.  I don’t need to know yet again how the evening light is hitting the hospital room wall.  I get it.  Move along.

4.  The lack of action by the main characters.  You know if you’re in love with a person you haven’t seen in twenty years you would think you’d take more action in finding them again than just hoping that one day you’ll bump into them on the street.  Or if you’re wondering if your mother really died when you were an infant you’d look up the death records.  Both Aomame and Tengo’s progression through the plot is achieved somehow through their inaction.  In fact Aomame stays in one place for about half the novel, never venturing outside.  Tengo finally decides to somehow come to an understanding about the difficult relationship he had with his father by waiting until the man was in a coma and Tengo sits each day for weeks reading to him.

5.  The objectification of women.  It’s not just the constant boob descriptions.  It’s the tame lesbian sexual encounters by non-lesbian women.  It’s the brutal rapes.  It’s the brutal murders of two women, both unrelated by somehow done in the same manner.  Ick.

6.  Plot devices and characters that go nowhere.  I got very tired of things, if not being explained exactly, then not really contributing to the whole story.  Aomame meets a female police officer and they meet up on occasion to pick up guys in bars for wild sexual encounters.  Why?  Why are we told over and over that Aomame left her Jehovah’s Witness family when she’s eleven years old if we never find out what spurs such a move?  What’s really the point of Tengo’s disturbing daydream/memory  Why are we told about a militant group breaking away from the religious cult?  Why does the NHK collector continue to torment Aomame and Fuka-Eri?  Why are we told the mistress can’t come back but never know the circumstance surrounding it?  None of it seems to propel the story forward.

7.  Flat characters.  And the two flattest were Aomame and Tengo.  They both seem obsessive with their fastidious traits and schedules but it doesn’t make them feel like well rounded people.  They don’t seem as though they’d be interesting to talk to or that you could ever get to know them.  Maybe that’s why they’re so in love with each other.  They’re the ones able to tolerate how dull each is.  The two characters that seem the most realistic is the wealthy dowager and her bodyguard.  Those are the two you can imagine having led a full, if not unusual, life.

8.  Zero humor.  Well, it wasn’t truly zero.  There’s a part where Tengo thinks to himself about the ugly private detective’s hair and judges that if he asked 100 people what it reminded them of, 98 of them would say “pubic hair” and he had no idea what the other 2 would think.  I chuckled at that.  The rest?  Nothing amusing and in a book like this, a little humor to lighten up some grim subject matter would have been welcome.

I would still give this novel three stars because the writing wasn’t complete shit.  There was something about it that kept me slogging through over 900 pages.  Murakami has constructed 1Q84 in a way that makes the reader keep going because the reader wants to finally get these scattered pieces put together and see the full picture.  But that’s the biggest problem with the novel.  It doesn’t happen.

Surely most of you have seen those mysterious treasure boxes.  You slide wooden  panels and line up pieces in order to get the box to spring open and reveal what’s inside.   You think the treasure box is fun.  You slide and move and attempt to get things to line up so you can get the box to open.  You enjoy working on it.  You put in a lot of time and effort in the project and when you finally do get it open, there’s nothing inside.  It’s a lot of work for no payoff.  Reading 1Q84 is like that.  After all those hundreds of pages you don’t know what things are or what they mean any more than when you first encountered them in the book.

There’s a scene where Tengo’s father (pre-coma, of course) tells Tengo “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you won’t understand it with an explanation.”  If only I’d taken this advice to heart before I read another 500 pages I could have saved myself a lot of time.