Murakami's 1Q84 was Disappointing
My new least favorite book by one of my favorite authors
Last night I finished Haruki Murukami’s 1Q84 on Audible, after about three months of evening listening. I’ll start with the punchline—which was something I realized weeks ago: of the half dozen or so Murakami books I’ve read, this is my least favorite. It’s long, plodding, and doesn’t feel like it fully fleshes out or resolves the ideas and issues it raises. I really like Murakami’s writing, so I didn’t feel like it was all bad. There are lots of strange, dream-like passages that are hypnotic and compelling—something Murakami does incredibly well. That’s the synopsis without getting into spoilers. Below, I’m going to get into the details of why I felt this way.
Spoilers for 1Q84 Start Here!
The novel begins with a female protagonist, Aomame descending into what we later realize is a sort of alternate reality where certain events in Japan have unfolded differently. There was a famous shootout between police and cult that she hears about, but doesn’t recall. Most strikingly, there’s a second moon in the sky. These weird details force Aomame to consider what’s real. Is there something she has missed? How could this big unusual event have happened without her knowing? This is the kind of magical realism that feels intriguing.
When the nature of reality begins to shift under the feet of a protagonist, it makes us imagine a world where we might still be surprised and mystified by what happens to us. This is a kind of re-enchanting of reality. In our day-to-day lives, what we encounter feels routine and also explicable. I have to do laundry so that I’ll have clean clothes for the coming week. Even though I don’t fully understand how a washing machine works (in the sense that I couldn’t design, build, or fix one), the washing machine doesn’t offer any mystery to me. But something unusual like a violent event in history that I had never heard of—or a second moon in the sky—invites a kind of wonder and curiosity.
That wonder and curiosity about the altered nature of reality is what I wanted resolved over the course of the novel. That’s not to say that I needed a special alternate physics (it’s because of “quantum effects”) or special set of magical rules (“vampires can live forever, but they can also be killed by exposure to sunlight”). Instead, I wanted to feel a sort of emotional climax and resolution. What did it mean to be in this alternate reality? What kinds of wisdom did it impart? What changed inside our protagonist as a result of having visited?
I don’t feel like those questions were fully answered. There is a change in the character: she gets pregnant through a sort of magical tranfer of semen from a sex act she is not involved in. It also emerges throughout the novel that this protagonist had been involved in a cult during her childhood, and that her deepest desire is to be reunited with a boy she fell in love with during grade school. But these don’t feel like revelations for her. They’re revelations for the audience, since we’re only slowly given access to these feelings. In other words, she isn’t really changing internally. Weird stuff is just happening to her.
At the end of the novel, when she finally gets what she wants—to be with that young boy, now a kind and mild-mannered man—it feels like a let down. I wanted to know what the deal was with getting pulled into this weird world. There was a lot of talk about “the little people,” magical beings who seem to have world altering powers and crawl out of the mouth of dead goat (and later a dead man!), but it feels like that thread is ultimately dropped. What do they represent? What did they do? I don’t even know how she—or the other protagonist, her long lost love—feel about them. Did they want to avoid the little people? There are definitely moments where it seems like they are malicious. But didn’t they have some curiosity about them, and want to figure out a bit about how they work? That doesn’t really seem to be the case.
Content Warning: Abuse of Women
Probably the most interesting part of the narrative is understanding Aomame’s job. She’s a hired assassin who kills rich men who have abused women. She’s hired by a rich dowager who has created a safe house for these abused women. There are cases when, they all agree, the only way for these women to avoid further torment is to just kill their tormenters. That’s a strange and interesting premise! And there’s plenty of room to explore the morality of it, and the possible qualms someone might have at being an assassin, in this huge sprawling novel.
There’s even a specific place that seems well set up to explore that morality: when Aomame is assigned the task of killing a cult leader who has raped multiple young girls in the cult. He seems like a horrific person, but when she meets him she finds that he’s being sort of controlled by the little people. The little people seem to be making copies of young girls, and then making these copies have sex with him. Or maybe they aren’t copies. Maybe they are the original young women, but with some sort of weird mind control going on. It’s not totally clear. In any case, he doesn’t like his life, and he asks her to kill him.
What does it mean that this man is having sex with young girls at the behest of the little people? Shouldn’t we then regard the little people as evil? Why doesn’t Aomame ask more questions about the little people, and try to stop them? Why does this man feel powerless to reject the little people, who are asking him to do evil things? Is it redemtive that this man wanted to die? Maybe, but it didn’t seem clear that he was asking primarily because he didn’t want to rape girls—or clones of girls. He mostly seems interested in death because he has chronic pain.
Maybe this is where the novel ultimately lost me. The sexual politics are strange and offputting. There are some strange, horny passages where Aomame meets up with a friend who encourages her to have group sex with strangers they meet. Both of them are into the pick-up scene, and it’s treated as a pretty normal, healthy part of their lives. (That seems positive!) But then there’s a lot of sexual abuse, and abuse of children, that seems unresolved. That’s disturbing, and the lack of emphasis—or at least the lack of resolution regarding those actions (what did they mean? why did they happen? how did the girls deal with the trauma of the situation?)—makes its inclusion feel gross.
Then there’s the other protagonist, long-lost-love Tengo, who has sex with a 17-year-old girl who he helped ghostwrite a novel for. This is portrayed as something passive, that happens to him. And it’s implied that his orgasm in that sex act is so crazy powerful that it impregnates Aomame, who is across the city from him. Which is a strange, magical realism type event—perfect for a Murukami novel. But it’s also a little weirdly pervy old man wish fulfillment-y.
The novelist Tengo keeps his heart pure for Aomame, who is the woman he really wants to be with, and who he truly cares about. But then he happens to be staying with a beautiful 17-year-old girl who climbs into bed and has sex with him in the middle of the night, giving him an incredible physics-defying orgasm? And that orgasm is actually cool and good because it impregnates Aomame across the city, and it turns out she’s super happy with being pregnant, and intuits that it’s from her long lost love? I mean, sure.
But if you’re going to have that kind of horny old man wish fulfillment in there, and you get into some hot and heavy sex scenes, then maybe leave the child abuse parts out? Because if you want to have child abuse in there, then you really need to have the kind of attitude around sex that feels nuanced enough to handle it. You need to make it feel like sex isn’t primarily in this book as a sort of wish fulfillment. But that type of nuance is lacking, and it probably was too much for me to ever get back on board.
There are some interesting parts to the novel, and I did enjoy sections that follow Tengo doing ghost writing at the behest of a slightly slimy publishing world figure. It was interesting to hear how he described the novel he was working on, because it was the kind of description that could apply perfectly well to several Murakami novels: strange and a bit disjointed, but capturing a certain feeling and idea that stays with you for a long time afterwards. That sort of raw emotional force without the technical attention to detail to fully flesh out the logic of the world and complete the thoughts that are raised by the book is a fair assessment of the work it’s featured in. I’m sure there will be a lot that I’ll remember about 1Q84, but there was a lot about it that disappointed me, too.