1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

 

I first became award of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami a little over two years ago, reading two of his novels - Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore. Both of my blog posts written at the time were favorable toward Murakami, although I mentioned that I thought his novels went into far too much detail about the sexual activities of the characters.

There's no lack of sexual activity in 1Q84 but it seems to be more important to the story than was the case in the earlier novels.

The story takes place in a fictionalized 1984 which slightly parallels the real 1984. The protagonist refers to this parallel year in which she finds herself as 1Q84.

The novel was originally published in Japanese as three separate volumes between 2009 and 2010. When the work was translated into English, it was published as one novel. In the ebook format I have, the book is nearly 850 pages and when I began reading it I was not expecting to finish all three volumes in time to list the book in this month's reading list. I managed to finish the "trilogy" with one day to spare.

It's not really my purpose to go into detail regarding the plot of the book. One can go to Wikipedia for that. I will mention one detail. A musical work, Sinfonietta by Leoš Janáček plays a significant role in all three volumes. I wasn't familiar with Janáček prior to this and I couldn't resist searching for the piece on Spotify. Like two of the characters in 1Q84, I've taken to using Sinfonietta as background music for my workout. 

I'll be putting more of Murakami's novels into the queue.