Why Haruki Murakami’s ‘1Q84’ is all Q and no A

Mike Grist and how to fix it 10 Comments

For years now I’ve been waiting to read Haruki Murakami’s latest magnum opus 1Q84. It was released in Japan two years ago, it came out in Korean a year back (when SY read it), and now it’s finally come out in English- one massive tome 900 pages long, some 400,000 words in length, comprised of three books, which I’ve spent the last few weeks plowing through.

And, it’s kind of genius. With some very long stretches that suck.

I’ll qualify that in a minute. First I’ll tell you what it’s all about. There’s a boy and a girl, Tengo the writer and Aomame the hit girl, who held hands once when they were ten years old and were deeply affected by it. Now they’re 30 years old, both living unfulfilled and lonely lives, occasionally pining for each other but making no effort to get in touch. The book alternates between their two viewpoints, as they both swerve off the tracks of the year 1984 (when the novel is set) and into 1Q84 (the ‘Q’ stands for Question) where there are two moons (the regular one and a little craggy mossy one), rapist cults, Air Chrysalises, evil Little People who go “ho ho” (like Vonnegut in his tragi-comedy ‘Slapstick’), persistent spiritual NHK collectors, girls with simply fantastic boobs, and an awful lot of sitting around.

I think that’s about all the color of the novel expressed in one place. Perhaps I should even mark it up with ** SPOILER ** tags because it’s about as much information as Murakami ever gives us. Things are never really explained.

Tengo and Aomame swerve off the tracks into 1Q84 in different ways. He gets sucked into fraudulently ghost-writing a novel, while she exits a highway on foot by an emergency escape hatch. Whatever, we quickly get the impression that like the other Vonnegut novel TimeQuake, where the whole book is a long meditative preparation for Vonnegut (in the book as a character) to meet his fictional character Kilgore Trout, the structure of 1Q84 is that Aomame and Tengo are ultimately going to meet.

This will surely be a momentous occasion.

On the path to that point, we have to go through a lot of stuff. Some of that stuff is plot. Some of that plot is edge-of-the-seat exciting conflict, facing up to terrifying demons. But a lot of it is not. A lot of it is incredibly passive, sitting-by-the-wayside watching the world go by stuff. I mean simply stuff. Things happen around our characters, who largely float along on the tides from their birth, hang out in their apartments, contemplate the two moons, and wonder about what’s going on, while just sort of chilling and waiting for someone else to do something or for something generally to happen. A little of that goes a long way. A lot, which is what we largely get after the book’s mid-point, gets very tiresome.

OK stop. Perhaps you’ve read Murakami before? Then you want to call me out on this.

“Murakami is ALWAYS writing like this,” you want to say. “What did you expect? This is his thing. A world slightly warped, with regular life going on in it. Lots of listening to jazz, making seaweed soup (I believe that’s the technical term), and contemplating meaningful past events. THAT is Murakami.”

Well, yes. I doff my cap to you. That is Murakami. He doesn’t really write plot, certainly in more recent books. Perhaps he doesn’t much write character, since none of his characters do much of anything. Can anyone tell me what happened in ‘Wind Up Bird Chronicle’ or ‘Kafka by the Shore’, or describe any characters? Not me. One was about sitting in a well looking at the stars, the other about a shapeless formless battle with a nameless shapeless evil in the dark. Those were the central images, the key if you like, that Murakami riffs around.

And it is a riff. 1Q84 is one enormous jazz riff, because Murakami writes like jazz. He writes not character or plot, but mood. I seriously doubt he ever edits what he writes. I seriously doubt any editor in all of Japan has the chutzpah to edit him in any substantial way, considering his current level of fame (he’s tipped for a Literature Nobel prize). And the funny thing is, it largely works. We regular folk may not be able to explain why it works- since he really doesn’t follow any real writing conventions- but plainly it does. Murakami himself takes a stab at explaining, in a passage buried within a critique of the fictional book ‘Air Chrysalis’ that Tengo ghost-writes in 1Q84. In this Tengo largely becomes a mouth-piece for Murakami responding to his critics.

It goes a little something like this. The critic says of ‘Air Chrysalis’-

“The work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author’s intention, but many readers are likely to take this lack of clarification as a sign of authorial laziness.”

Tengo, AKA Murakami, is puzzled by this. If a story carries the reader to the very end, how can the author be lazy? He doesn’t know. I’m sure Murakami doesn’t know either. He just writes, and it comes out like this, and it is what it is. He doesn’t sweat the details. He certainly doesn’t sweat the ending of any of his books.

Embedding his pre-emptive response to critics into the book itself may be a kind of genius, even if that genius is just to say- “yeah, well, whatever.” The problem comes with whether this book actually does “carry the reader along to the very end.” Obviously I did read the whole book. But after the halfway fireworks (and there were fireworks, in the one major bit of conflict within the whole 900 pages), everything that followed was an utter trial, and I only dragged myself through it to see if it ever got better.

At the mid-point, I was ready to declare Murakami a genius. The middle is great- crammed with ideas, follow-through, execution. I whole-heartedly recommend the middle, where Aomame takes her hit-girl skills directly to the rapist cult. But after that came nothing. 400 pages of it. By the end, I was just bitter that such huge promise had been squandered. Murakami set up the fight, prepped the stakes and the stage, got the crowd in place for a huge knockout fight between Tengo and Aomame on one side and the Little People and the rapist cult on the other, and then…

pffffttt…

Nothing. 400 pages of Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’. Sitting and thinking, waiting, thinking. There would be no excuse and utterly no story to follow in this third part at all if not for the addition of a third narrator- the sad sack private detective Ushikawa with the funny head. This chap is hired by the rapist cult to find Aomame and deal with Tengo. We follow him as he mines both of their back stories. We get to watch them doing what they do best, sitting around moping, from his perspective.

This whole thread failed for me. Ushikawa was a cartoon, retreading old material. I knew it all, from the first two books. I wanted to shout at the book- You already told me ALL OF THIS, Murakami. You told me directly! Sure, it’s true that Ushikawa needs to find all out for himself- but do I really have to watch that? In this way, page by dreary page of repetition fills the last third.

So, that’s why 1Q84 kind of sucked. Even by Murakami’s own criteria- being carried along to the end of the book- it failed. I skipped large parts of Ushikawa, because there was nothing new. I wanted the conflict the middle had promised, the climactic battle, but he never delivered. I do like the mood stuff, the slow pace, the thoughtfulness. But by that point, with all that he’d promised with portentous thunder clouds and mystery, mood stuff alone is not enough. Mood alone is suffocating. you can’t raise the stakes on me then just drop the bar back to its lowest ebb, with scarcely any relent. In so doing Murakami set me up to expect something more, then whuffed it. He bypassed it completely. He jazz-riffed right around it.

Immense narrative promises were made. They were far from met. Oddly, Murakami even immunized himself against this failure by embedding numerous mentions of the Chekhov’s gun principle into the book- ‘if a gun appears in a book, it should be fired by the end.’ In 1Q84 the gun is both real and figurative, and in both forms it never fires. It keeps on not firing for hundreds of pages, long after the point of tension has passed.

So much was promised, and in the end, it was not delivered- possibly because the author didn’t really understand what he’d set up, possibly because he just didn’t care. It was too massive. It just wasn’t his style.

Ultimately, it all boils down to style. Murakami doesn’t really write like anyone else. I don’t think I’d dare to suggest what he should edit or change, because his work seems more art and philosophy than story. But as story, it doesn’t succeed. Story typically rises, and rises, and climaxes at the end. 1Q84 rises to a climactic middle, then just deflates like an overcooked souffle. Perhaps that is jazz though- very rarely can all the players get in sync for a run up to a climax.

Here’s my advice, if story is what you want. You’d do better to stop at the book’s halfway point, while the promise of rising stakes to come is still fresh. Then wash your hands of it, before all that lovely burgeoning promise slowly bleeds out in a slow and stale pfffffft.

“Nice ideas. Didn’t quite carry me through to the end.”

Comments 10

  1. I felt similarly after reading 1Q84.. Murakami set you up with such an interesting world, which completely stopped spinning in the end. I notice that in most of his works he introduces such great characters, but just doesn’t follow through with them. I was happy for Tengo and Aomame at the end, but I still wanted to know about the others, especially the little people. It was disappointing because I found the story truly fascinating.
    I do love Murakami’s writing though.. Probably because everyday tasks and slow conflicts intrigue me the most. However I really wish Murakami would put more detail into his endings, since the entire story is so detailed itself.

  2. I agree completely that the third “book” was a dud. I think at least part of this is due to the Japanese tendency to release a single novel in multiple volumes, three in this case (and I’m sure the publisher would’ve been thrilled with four for symmetry’s sake). It almost feels like Murakami felt pressured to write a third part to a novel that really only had enough story for two. And it’s unbelievably frustrating that he doesn’t seem to be interested in the world he sets up to actually do anything with it. I realize this is mainly the story of Tengo and Aomame finding each other and not necessarily the rise and fall of Sakigake or the Little People, but it would have been nice to have at least some attention paid to them in the final 300 or so pages. The maza-dohta concept, air chrysalises, and even the idea that an author is somehow inside his own work are all much more intriguing that Tengo and Aomame reconnecting, to be honest. Finally, the whole character of Ushikawa being lifted straight out of Wind-up Bird, even down to his same name, is just a bit too much to take. I like Murakami, but he’s by no means a Nobel-caliber writer and I’ve always found the suggestion that he is almost laughable.

  3. Two things.

    First, ‘Murakami Bingo’ has become a new meme: http://www.incidentalcomics.com/2012/06/haruki-murakami-bingo.html

    Second, “Why did Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 fail at the end?” All of his books have, except ‘Underground’, and that’s because it was non-fiction. ‘Underground’ and ‘The Wind Up Bird Chronicle’ are the only two books anyone should read by him – and the latter just to be done with his fiction.

    A hack, pure and simple.

  4. I have enjoyed all of Murakami’s novels apart from Norwegian Wood. In fact I have a problem reading other authors as they just don’t get under my skin like Murakami does. For me the non conclusions in his work force the reader to become part of the creative process, and forces you to make up your own mind about what happens. His novels always stay with me for a very long time afterwards. Murakami makes me think, makes me look at the world in a different light. He makes the mundane interesting. Yes I do agree that the repetitiveness in 1Q84 gets a bit dull, but I wouldn’t say that the book fails, I am still looking up at the sky, searching for the two moons.

  5. I always find it incredibly disappointing to read a review of a book that the writer admits he hasn’t read all of. If you “skipped large parts” of a character’s story then you didn’t read the book. I agree with a lot of what you say here, but if you didn’t read the whole book you can’t review the whole book.

  6. I totally agree! I should have stopped reading at the middle of it. After finishing the book, I felt I was robbed of my time, which was irretrievably lost, to think I prioritized reading this one rather than my required readings. Anyway, I think Murakami’s strength really relies on staging a good scenario but it was not properly directed in the end. There are a lot of loose ends which appears to have no sense at all. Who is Tamaru? Why did Ushikawa needs to still appear in the end. I especially hate that the ending that was too good to be true. Anyway, it made me feel good that I was not alone with these feelings.

  7. ^ I like how you used the words “irretrievably lost,” like Murakami used to describe Tengo’s older girlfriend. There are so many loose ends in this book. I couldn’t tear away from the fantasy of it, I thought it was all very imaginative and creative but he left so many loose ends and I don’t understand why. He couldn’t wrapped them all together nicely in a million different ways and everything could’ve all tied together and the book would’ve been a damn masterpiece. For example, why did he even mention the Little People making an air chrysalis out of Ushikawa’s hair in the end if he was going to do absolutely nothing with it?

    If he had just cut the book short and not lead Aomame and Tengo back up the expressway exit, and wrote an additonal book to neatly close off or tie together all of the open ends he left, I would’ve been much more content.

  8. I found it engrossing from the first page and wasn’t tempted to jump to the end.
    With regard to the repetition of Ushikawa, I thought that that was reinforcement of the idea of connected worlds. The Little People making an air chrysalis was a vehicle that might make that happen. Hence Ushikawa appearing in 1985 in Wind Up Bird *after* he had died in 1Q84. And appearing as a less complex character. Dohta chatacteristics.

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