1Q84 is a joke hidden in a title. In Japanese the number nine is pronounced kyลซ, the same as the English letter Q, so to a Japanese reader the title sounds like 1984 and looks like something slightly off. That is the whole premise in four characters: a woman steps out of a taxi in Tokyo in 1984 and finds herself in a version of the year that is almost, but not quite, the real one. The book it points at is Orwellโs.
It is also the Murakami novel I enjoyed least, and it sits last but three on my ranking of his sixteen novels. Plenty of his readers consider it his masterpiece, so this page gives you whatโs worth knowing about the book, and then an honest answer to the question many people are asking by the time they search for it: whether the rest of the novel is worth the time.
The Q
Murakami supplied his own romanized reading of the title, ichi-kew-hachi-yon, one-Q-eight-four, and the letter carries more than one meaning. It sounds like nine, which makes the title a near-homophone of the year. And within the novel the heroine, Aomame, names the altered year herself, with the Q standing for question, since the world she has slipped into is one she can no longer take on trust.
The Orwell connection runs through the book in a sideways form. In place of Big Brother, 1Q84 has the Little People, strange beings whose power over the world is never fully explained, working through a closed religious community rather than a state. Murakami has said he wanted to write a novel about the near past, in the way Orwell had written about the near future.
The Music in the Taxi
The novel opens with Aomame stuck in traffic while the taxi radio plays Leoลก Janรกฤekโs Sinfonietta, a busy, brass-heavy piece that becomes a recurring thread between the bookโs two protagonists. Murakami told The New York Times Magazine that he chose it precisely because it was not popular music at all, and because it was strange. He had heard it once in a concert hall with fifteen trumpeters behind the orchestra, and he listened to it over and over while writing the opening scene.
Then the novel made it popular. Recordings of the Sinfonietta sold noticeably better in Japan after 1Q84 came out, and Murakami said the conductor Seiji Ozawa thanked him because his own recording had sold well.
The Cult Underneath
The religious community at the center of 1Q84, known as Sakigake, has been read by critics against Murakamiโs most serious nonfiction. After the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, Murakami spent 1996 interviewing victims for his book Underground, and he later interviewed members of Aum itself for a second volume, The Place That Was Promised. The English edition of Underground combines both.
Critics have drawn parallels between those interviews and the novelโs picture of an isolated religious group, how it draws people in and what it does to them once they are inside.
A Publishing Event
When Books 1 and 2 came out together in Japan on May 29, 2009, the first printing sold out on the day of release, and sales reached a million copies within a month. Book 3 followed in April 2010. Murakami spent four years writing the whole thing after the opening scene and the title came to him.
The English translation, by Jay Rubin for Books 1 and 2 and Philip Gabriel for Book 3, arrived on October 25, 2011. In the US it was published as one enormous volume, and reviews were split. Some critics were enthusiastic, and Janet Maslin in The New York Times was notably unconvinced.
Should You Finish It?
My view is the same one I gave on the ranking page. The first half of 1Q84 is fantastic. Past that point, at nearly a thousand pages, it became tedious and repetitive for me, going over ground it had already covered without moving the story on, and it is the only time a Murakami novel has left me feeling my time was being wasted.
Plenty of his fans call it his masterpiece, and the first half is strong enough that it stays on my list. If youโre partway through and loving it, keep going, since a lot of readers love the whole thing. If itโs starting to drag for you the way it did for me, the two Murakami novels at the top of my ranking are Kafka on the Shore and, in first place, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
Which Copy
The US edition collects all three books in a single volume. Some other English-language editions split the novel, with Books 1 and 2 in one volume and Book 3 in another, so check what youโre buying before you order. The translation is the same Rubin and Gabriel text in every case.
Where to Go Next
The novel Iโd hand a newcomer instead is on the Kafka on the Shore page, and the long novel many readers call his best is covered on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle page. The full ranking is on the Haruki Murakami guide.
For the book whose title this one plays on, the 1984 page covers Orwellโs novel and its appendix, and the best Japanese novels list places Murakami among the writers around him.
