Review: 1Q84

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hooter: In Japan, an Assassin and a writer are coming to terms with their shifted reality in 1984, terming it as 1Q84 as their lives are seemingly parallel lines which are bound to intersect thanks to a super secret religious commune coming into the mix.

The second book in the trilogy picks up the pace after the character building exercise of the first book. It fast forwards through a lot of open threads of the religious militant commune and it's Great Leader as Aomame meets him on a secret mission to eliminate him thanks to the dowager. The great leader instead helps open up a lot of mysteries for her . In parallel, sitcking to the story progression in parallel chapters, Tengo our math teacher gets up to date with the story line thanks to Fuka Eri. The tension of these two eternal love birds and will they ever meet continues whilst the Little People get more exposure in this book. Their motives still unclear but their existence has been registered.

The first book focussed on building the environment, the second one has the protagonists coming to terms with it but still a lot more to be answered in the third one. As a lot of folks have rightly mentioned, you can't do these books alone and need to read the trilogy as one big book.

Murakami continues to follow a structure of his own with vivid descriptions, mundane details and a non-conforming story structure along with dialogues. He is mixing up fantasy with realism and drawing a very thin line amongst both. This isn't going down 1984 path which seemed to be the case after book 1 but building a whole new giant world of it's own.

What I have never quite understood is how lightly he treats rape especially underage ones even if as a concept in the book, he explains it isn't so. Dress it in whatever finery you want, underlying sexism is out there for all to see. I get from Book 1 the publisher talking about sex being a critical part of a bestseller and that Murakami draws from real life probably.

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