1Q84 Book Review: Murakami Wrote a 1,200-Page Novel and I Wanted It to Be Longer

Rating: ★★★★★

"1Q84" Book Review:

Let me tell you what you're signing up for: 1Q84 is nearly 1,200 pages long. It is a Haruki Murakami novel, which means the plot will not behave the way you expect plots to behave. Characters will cook elaborate meals while the world unravels. There will be a cat. There will be jazz. There will be a moment where reality splits and you won't be entirely sure it happened. And you will not want it to end.

The story follows two people in parallel. Aomame is an assassin who kills men who abuse women. Tengo is a math teacher and aspiring writer who is hired to rewrite a strange novel by a seventeen-year-old girl. Their storylines run parallel through 1984 Tokyo — except it's not quite 1984. Aomame notices a second moon in the sky. The world has shifted. She calls this new reality 1Q84, with the Q standing for question mark.

Murakami builds the alternate reality with his signature patience. He doesn't explain the rules. He lets you feel the wrongness accumulate. A religious cult called Sakigake sits at the center of the mystery, connected to both Aomame's targets and Tengo's ghostwriting project. The Little People — entities that emerge from the mouths of the dead and build air chrysalises from threads of nothingness — are among the strangest and most unsettling creations in Murakami's catalog, which is saying something.

What holds all 1,200 pages together is the love story. Aomame and Tengo knew each other as children. They shared a single moment of connection in an elementary school classroom — she held his hand — and both have spent twenty years carrying that moment without knowing the other person remembers. Murakami takes nearly a thousand pages before they find each other again, and by then the weight of that reunion is almost unbearable. He earned every one of those pages.

The prose, even in translation, has Murakami's unmistakable quality: clear, calm, precise, with a dreamlike undertow that pulls you deeper without your noticing. He writes loneliness better than anyone alive. He writes the experience of being a person alone in a city, cooking dinner, listening to music, waiting for something they can't name, with a tenderness that makes solitude feel sacred.

This is Murakami's longest novel and possibly his most ambitious. Five stars. Clear your schedule. Bring snacks. You're going to be here for a while, and you're going to be grateful.

If You Liked 1Q84, Try:

• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami — If you haven't read Murakami's other masterpiece, this is where most people fall in love with him. Same dreamlike structure, shorter, equally unforgettable.

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro — A quiet, devastating novel about love and mortality set in an alternate England. Same patient accumulation of wrongness.

• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov — A surreal Russian novel where the Devil visits Moscow. Same collision of the mundane and the impossible, same refusal to explain the rules.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If you enjoyed this book review, check out The Seven Dimensions — a multidimensional memoir that shares Murakami's conviction that reality has more layers than anyone admits, rewriting one human life across seven dimensions the way 1Q84 rewrites 1984 with a second moon and a question mark.

Learn More: The Seven Dimensions

The Seven Dimensions by Luke Stoffel