Oh well, here we are, aren’t we? I did not intend writing about this book, as the things I have to put here into words have already gone through my mind several times. Doing it once again, trying to be coherent, is just more unpleasant effort. But here we are.
The title, 1Q84, should essentially be “Q” as a Q-uestion. So it works better for me as 1?84.
I started reading this book, I think, a couple of years ago and despite having bought it already close when it was released, in English. I read the first part (of three, roughly 300 pages each) as a break while reading through Bakker, and I think I intended to read another Bakker book in between and then finish with the second and third part. But I think everything got delayed and in the end 1?84 was shelved until this month (April). March ended another long, difficulty journey, because I decided to read “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” in late September, and it took me exactly 6 months to finish.
I’m not going to try to write about “Miss MacIntosh,” I just know it will haunt me until the end of my life. It was a difficult read, of a very long book, but not because the text itself is especially hard. It required a significant effort to maintain focus and concentration. In the end I kept a very regular schedule, managing to read about 8 pages every day. That was my maximum, but also consider this is a big book, the pages are dense with extremely rare line breaks. Like climbing a mountain, you cannot race the way up, you need to take your time. So there went six months.
By the time I picked up 1?84 everything felt effortless, I could read 30 pages without getting tired, but in the end I took some breaks here and there and it still took me another month to finish the book. I was reading in a weird way as I was reading a couple new chapters while also going back a couple of chapters, into the first part I already read, as a way to familiarize me again with the story. Then I stopped after a hundred pages since I already had everything I needed, and then I proceeded straight onward.
This is going to be full spoilers, rather than a review. But I certainly don’t have an explanation for the book. It’s one big question mark for me.
I have no idea what this book is about.
Starting with the “little people,” which are the easy part of the book. Easiest to wrap up. The one part that actually needs no explanation at all. It is obvious to me that the author simply wanted a creepy element. Creepy in how they are described. They are otherworldly metaphysical beings, but they appear as small people with normal faces and normal clothes, just small. This association of incongruous aspects is the whole deal. They come out of dead people, they come out of mouths, but they seem relatively harmless, like kids that want to play. The book doesn’t really offer more than this. There’s a difference between a mystery that is rich with aspects, but hard to solve, and one like this case where the limited number of elements offer just directly tells you there’s “no more.”
More relevant is the 1?84 itself. This book is very “meta” and very conscious about mixing fictional spaces with the real. The characters themselves are fully aware about what they are dealing with. 1Q84 is merely the label Aomame gives to this fictional world she entered. She is fully aware of its fictional aspect, and considers it explicitly in the light of “1984” the book by Orwell. This is something I especially liked because the level of the readers is seamlessly merged with the characters. Those characters ask themselves the same questions you have as a reader, so they don’t stay protected within a fictional cocoon, they don’t dodge those questions.
The only real revelation at the end of the book is that the whole 1?84 is “the Cat town,” it was a fictional whole that they had to escape, rather than this Cat town being Tengo’s only, limited to the space where he went to meet his father. This is even explicitly confirmed through the owl, or whatever the more hallucinatory scenes. There’s an explicit contextual shift, as some lines there emphasized and repeated so that they apply to the wider context. This ominous, weird Cat town, that you find yourself in, but is very tricky to escape from. This is the whole deal. The little people are the cats of Cat town, but we also see explicit ghosts (Tengo’s father, literally haunting Fuka-Eri, Aomame and Ushikawa).
I did enjoy reading the book, as I said coming from Miss MacIntosh it felt very effortless and pleasant. Despite characters lost in precisely described daily habits, I was not bored or feeling like the book was slow going. It felt breezy for me, even if it didn’t have anything immediately concrete. But then… The end of the second part has a giant cliffhanger. The third part begins without resolving any of it, and it started feeling very frustrating, and after a few more chapters downright irritating. When a mystery is set in the first part, you expect it to start unravel in the second, and then accelerating to find an end on the third. What happens here is that there’s a major scene toward the second half of the second part, where a literal deus ex machina narrows down the scope of this mystery, give it a better shape, but without solving any of it. Again you expect this to develop from there. But instead the third part begins by slowing down. Until it grinds to a complete halt and never recovers.
At that point I started to feel a bit like I was reading Bakker’s last book: there isn’t enough space left to solve any of this. Even worse, there is nothing offered. Nothing at all. Not one single element. Nothing is going to be solved here. Then come the final hundred pages, that do accelerate, but it’s a very straightforward denouement. You can essentially close the book and guess the rest: you will be right.
The book essentially ended in the first 200 pages, out of 900. Outside of the infodump in the key scene in the second section, which defines the mystery but without really adding anything, there isn’t ANYTHING ELSE. Characters carry on their lives, you get to see that, but there’s nothing more about the nature of the story. What was offered in the first 200 pages is the same you have at the end. The whole premise of the book was the whole, nothing else.
Yet the book leaves you with lots of unsolved branches. Stuff that didn’t converge and seemingly went nowhere. The characters constantly “recap” what happened, especially in the third part. So that it feels like it’s downright impossible to miss anything. Even worse, there are some more subtle connections, again in the third part, that are completely robbed of their effect and subtlety because the author is too scared that they might be missed. There are SEVERAL, deliberate point of view violations where the scene is sharply broken with a forced intrusion of omniscient narrator, explicitly to tell the reader not to miss one of these links. Which is really puzzling because I was fully conscious of what was going on, ahead of every single time the omniscient narrator stepped in to babysit the process. It was totally unnecessary, and yet there it is, the author taking your hand to carefully guide you through. For details of the plot that are either self explanatory, or just surface events that aren’t important. And yet, there’s a myriad of other elements that very vaguely hint at more but, not only they stay unsolved, but unsolvable. The pieces of this puzzle are so vague you don’t even know if you have enough to solve it. You don’t know how many pieces there are, you don’t even know if some piece has a specific shape that might be useful, or is just an unconnected one that has no place. You aren’t even in the position to start working on a solution. Creating this irritating, sharp divide between things of the plot that the author wants 100% solved, hammered down in plain sight, and that are largely irrelevant (or utterly predictable, see the last 100 pages), and other mysteries that are instead very relevant, but just fall off the edge of the book, in near total obscurity.
Some subtle things we know, like Tengo’s father’s ghost, going around to haunt the main characters. Apparently no real purpose because I don’t think his appearances produce any plot related consequences. Lots of dialogues going on, but none of those characters seem to be taking actions caused or modified by those apparitions. The whole role of Tengo’s father could be, maybe, wrapped up as a whole. I was annoyed when he refused to answer plain questions. The idea of some things that you either “get or don’t”, because they can’t be explained with words, this concept just doesn’t work. It’s stupid and objectively false. Tengo asks if his father is his real father, he refuses to answer. You just can’t handwave it. The end of the book “seem” to indicate that maybe he was indeed his real father. Maybe, again, it’s a matter of “love.” In the sense that this father-son relationship was one of duty, not out of love. But again, the end seem to indicate this father cared for Tengo. Just something with his mother (wife) destroyed his life. But can you explain “love” with words? You either understand it, or if it’s simply spoken it might as well be completely false. You either know or don’t (being loved or loving, both).
Since in the third part I noticed the author repeating things over and over, I didn’t stress on certain concepts because I was sure they would be explained before the last page. While I lost any hope about the mystery itself, I thought that at least some details would be at least clarified. For example the functional distinction between “maza” and “dohta.” Nope, nothing. Nothing AT ALL. Despite the characters explicitly wonder themselves about which is which, which one is the receiver and which the perceiver. To not even consider that they share the same function in their translation. Something that “receives” is something that “perceives” what it “receives,” they are the same fucking thing. They would be different if something perceives whatever, and something else makes it known. With Fuka-Eri and Tengo, where this is more explicitly referenced, MAYBE it makes more sense because Fuka-Eri perceives, being a literal walking deus ex machina of godlike proportion, so she has this metaphysical, explicitly omniscient, channel, but apparently it’s Tengo who then has any acting control on any of this. Fuka-Eri shapes the story, but only Tengo is real, to be able to do anything about it and so make conscious choices, “receiving” these messages and deciding what to do with them.
Should be obvious, at this point, that this, all of this, is a load of bullshit. But a whole load, you can’t imagine. Fuka-Eri is deus ex machina. She steps in and out of the pages as she pleases. She’s never in any danger because she’s omniscient about the whole thing. She doesn’t even have to dodge bullets, because she simply is where the bullets aren’t, at any point. She looks at the world, she frowns, takes a spin and there she goes. But then there’s “leader,” the spiritual one. This one is one GIANT deus ex machina. He’s huge in physical form and just knows everything without even a weak attempt at making his knowledge logical. It is explicit, again, he just knows and doesn’t need any causal explanation for that knowledge. It is PROVEN that only omniscient knowledge is possible here. And he takes control of things to shape them, very deliberately. He moves all the pieces as he likes, then there he goes. But this isn’t all, and why it’s a full load of bullshit. Because no matter the amount of super-natural maneuvering already described. THE MAIN CHARACTER THEMSELVES are fully acting on the basis of “hunches.” Fully of their own. Tengo can reliably predict who’s calling him on the phone, because apparently the way the phone rings betrays who’s making the call. This could be just a fun quirky choice of the author, to take for what it is, if it wasn’t for countless other examples where characters act illogically just because they “feel” something, and this vague feeling maneuvers them precisely where they need to be. It’s not just a way to interpret and romanticize happenstance, it’s purely, explicit metaphysical intervention.
There’s maybe a way to hammer this down, as there are other parts that have rational explanation but still kind of “fictional.” This is indeed an explicit fictional world. The book explicitly flirts with itself as a concept. With 1984, the book, being symbolic. And this is a book within a book, a reality with two moons wrapped within reality. The Cat town is specifically the space where fictional things take place, you just surrender logic to be offered, ideally, some deeper sense.
Deeper sense that never touches the core mystery. This air chrysalis never delivers a solution. By the end of the book we have the initial one by Fuka-Eri that originated from what, a goat? Some kind of dead animal I can’t remember. Then we have the chrysalis Tengo sees at the hospital, the one that contains a young Aomame. Then another built by little people, coming out of Ushikawa’s mouth, explicitly taking three days of methodical work and consistent with the first. And another one, apparently, Aomame’s womb. There is no real consistency between these, no rule, no pattern. When I said this puzzle isn’t simply unsolved, but unsolvable, it is because these shapes are vague in themselves, you don’t even know which ones are supposed to be placed together (while writing this I thought maybe there’s another chrysalis, the little people that came out back at the dowager house, coming out the mouth of one of the abused kids). The first air chrysalis seems to be triggered by a trauma. It’s not like the little people do as they please. Their entry seem to be caused by some human event, like classic gods that take shape from metaphor. More annoyingly there’s a not so subtle theme of godlike presence that regulates the world. At some point like a conflicting power with little people, some kind of counterbalance.
Tamaru’s words at the end go in this direction: “Cold or not, God is present.” But I thought this little contained story was more about the tower described itself, as an “archetype.” But can I really go there? Is the book this subtle? After Tengo’s father was “enabled” as a literal ghost, there were a lot of other weird hints and possibilities. This is a dimension being visited by otherworldly presences. Does this work even with those that are gone? Nothing quite explicit in the book (since the father’s ghost is contemporary to the father being alive, while in a coma, then it disappears). Is there a link between the girl that died (Tamaki Otsuka) during high school before Aomame entered 1?84 and then Ayumi Nakano? Is there a link between Ayumi Nakano, who got choked to death, and Tengo’s mother, who Ushikawa seem to reveal was also choked to death? Is there a link between Tengo’s mother and the nurse, Kumi Adachi? In my own, weak, interpretation, Kumi Adachi is Tengo’s mother. Taking care of Tengo’s father. She said she had an experience of dying, and she decides to stay with Tengo’s father. There’s the whole hallucinatory sequence, with again the omniscient messages to Tengo, and the blend with the owl. There was an owl or a pigeon that was regularly visiting outside the window of Tengo’s apartment, even Fuka-Eri mentioned it on the phone. At some point I though this bird was the metaphysical channel that Fuka-Eri used to get her otherworldly knowledge, but in the wider perspective the most plausible theory is that this “figure” is merely yet another incarnation of some character, much like the ghost. They just manifest themselves.
Is there any way to “solve” this? I have no idea. I don’t know what there is beyond what I already wrote down. There is no space to move forward with any of this. And then the book. The book had no interest about offering more. The mystery that is set in the first 200 pages merely fizzles out. Professor Ebisuno had a plan to find out about Fuka-Eri’s father. Both the professor, Fuka-Eri, and anything related to that whole thing fall conspicuously off the page. In some way it’s like part 2 & 3 of the book are sequels to a different book. The story clamps down on the fated supernatural love between Tengo & Aomame. Everything else disappears, outside of tenuous links of relationship. Character stories, with dubious conclusions.
What the fuck happened with Tengo’s older girlfriend?
P.S.
Not gonna say much about the creepy sexual rites. It’s such a blatant and weird inversion, setting up this “leader” as an obvious monster, only to subvert it by saying he only sexually destroys these kids while being paralyzed. Therefore no agency, how can you blame him? It’s just a literary trick to subvert morals, but it’s so dumb. These kids being assaulted? Oh they aren’t real, they are mystical figures who feel no pain, aren’t real persons, they can be recreated as zombies. On one hand the author depicts all of this in a creepy negative way, denouncing these cults as perversions. But then, in the story, all of this gets validated. The supernatural bits are true, the metaphysical powers are true, the voices are true. This is, in the story, a real cult worshiping real forces. There’s no ambiguity or ambivalence. The whole moral layer isn’t thrown out of the window, but it’s obvious that once you validate the whole process there’s not much space to maneuver. Which is also why the book finale completely fails. The idea is that, given all that went on, in the end Aomame & Tengo destiny is now in their own hands. This is explicitly written in the book. But nope, it doesn’t work like that. No matter what, EVERYTHING they’ve done and that they do, is very deliberately driven by an invisible hand. They are puppets, they have no control. This is just a stage.
P.P.S.
I’m reading a few comments and reviews online and there are plenty of complaints about this book being sexist and misogynist. It’s not completely false, but it would be better if people arrived to a judgment rather than starting from one. It is true that there’s emphasis on describing women by the fullness and shape of their breasts, but in a rather similar way, Aomame is very explicitly obsessed by the shape of a man’s head. She can’t help observing men’s head shape and create her own classification. It seems to me that this is very explicitly and deliberately described in the book as a neurotic obsession. There tons of other things in the book that are neurotic and repeatedly described in minutiae. Most of these non-sexual. It seems to me this is more like a deliberate quirk in the way you turn a story into a more physical substance, to give it a tangible shape, more than some kind of imposed ideology. Also, Tengo’s girlfriend isn’t there to be Tengo’s sexual object. If that’s what you get, you can’t read. Tengo is his girlfriend sexual object. She bosses him around constantly, she shows up when she wants, does with Tengo whatever she wants and however it pleases her. Tengo is fully passive. Until the very end, because Aomame is very much the strong deliberate woman. Once she takes the initiative she tells precisely Tengo what to do, and from that point onward Tengo follows her on a leash like a puppy dog. The two times he open his mouth to voice something nonsensical, Aomame smiles and pets him, “of course, you cutie, of course.” The book ends with an awfully written sex scene, even there Aomame gives him the order to please her. This apparent sexism is rather equally split if you aren’t selectively blind to the other half.
P.P.P.S.
Everything written above was the result of my own autonomous thoughts after closing the book. I’ve now gone though more online comments in the hope of finding some better explanations or hints, but I can’t say I found much that can be of any use. At least I confirmed that most readers are on the same page and that I didn’t miss anything big. Some of the more annoying unsolved mysteries seem to be the same questions everyone is asking, and that can’t answer.
One thing I didn’t cover in the above, is the whole metaphysical context. This is very much nailed down precisely, because given by the omniscient point of view in part 2. Now, it’s always possible this party is lying, or not telling the complete story, but there isn’t much consequence to these doubts. When this is the only omniscient, and so authoritative, piece of knowledge, you cling to it until there’s something better. And this book offers nothing else. So what is this wider context? When Aomame moves from legit 1984 to 1Q84, she doesn’t step into a parallel reality in the conventional sense. “Leader” states that once you move between one and the other, the one you leave behind is permanently gone. There is no “true” reality merely because there aren’t alternatives. The rule is one “current” reality. This also completely closes the door for the possibility of RETURNING to 1984. This too is explicitly denied. But the process still exists. Given these rules, when Tengo & Aomame “enter the portal” at the end of the book, they don’t return to 1984, nor they stay in 1Q84, they merely skip ahead to something new once again. In the wider metaphysical context this means that reality moves linearly. It can change course, so integrating aspects of alternative realities, with their own timeline variations, but only one stays active at any time, and the whole deal only moves forward linearly. This is the given authoritative context. Anything else would be baseless speculation.
On the merit of metaphysics, the little people concept is explicitly addressed in the book, somewhere in part 2. I forgot the details, but the “Little People” are conceived as a rather blunt inversion of “Big Brother”. One big, the other little. With the idea that Big Brother is visible, conspicuous. A tyranny in control. Whereas the little people are invisible, shaping reality in subtle, unperceived ways. Without getting attention and awareness. While this is a powerful concept, it’s certainly not used in the book, where these little people are usually quite conspicuous. Though it’s mentioned that Ayumi, Aomame current friend, gets killed through indirect little people influence. Like a supernatural force that feeds and manipulates real people weaknesses. So, they don’t invent cause and effect, but nudge them. (though we also don’t know what little people goals would be, so don’t know which way they’d nudge things, or for what reason)
On the matter of other ideas I read, there’s one suggesting Tengo’s father may have killed his mother. Seems to be in some mention while Aomame was doing some research in discrepancies between 1984 and 1Q84? Don’t know, but doesn’t seem very plausible to me. The author point of view of Tengo’s father is somewhat neutral and not judgemental. The whole idea, this one explicit in the book, that Tengo’s mother is around in the form of nurse Kumi Adachi, taking care of what’s left of his father, really does ring false if he was the killer. Everything else in the book also ends up worse.
Some people seem to suggest all three nurses are reincarnations. It doesn’t seem plausible, but there’s a whole lot of untidy overlap. Aomame high school friend gets murdered just like the dowager daughter. Ayumi Nakano, Aomame later friend, got choked to death, Tengo’s mother got choked to death, Kumi Adachi, the nurse, remembers getting choked to death. Tego’s married girlfriend, we don’t know. Maybe the husband find out and choked her to death? Too much choking to death and not as a pattern that can solve anything I can see. There’s certainly a lot of domestic violence going on.
There’s an overall theory that scrambles all of this, but it’s too much in the air to be really useful. The premise just works: what if it’s all within Tengo’s mind? It works because the writer is Murakami, who’s a male writer. Tengo is a male writer, in the process of writing his fictional story. Of which we don’t really know anything despite it’s in quite an advance stage of progression and meaningful to Tengo. We only know it sort of continues Fuka-Eri’s story, as it’s being set in the same world. So this theory works because it’s merely true. It’s unambiguously Murakami fictional and personal world. The idea would be that the Aomame of 1Q84 is a fictionalized Aomame, Tengo’s school friend. Everything she is is projected fictionally by him. The love story is an ideal fiction and everything that happens within 1Q84 happens within the book his writing and “wishing true”. While it mostly works out, there’s the major problem of lacking a trigger. Within the context, Fuka-Eri is the trigger, Tengo just finds himself embroiled in it. I fail to see where the fictional layer gets draped in, if Tengo is in control of the whole deal. Again, this is an interesting perspective since it deeply shifts the whole context. It’s a radical reinterpretation. But while it can work, at least superficially, there’s really nothing in the book that suggests this being an option. You can find a number of hints that are coherent, but in order to embark in such a wild reinterpretation I’d need something that is more explicitly sustained and intended. Otherwise it’s just wild speculation that is merely raw invention. However compatible.
On the matter of the moons, we never quite know what other people see. We know Aomame, Tengo and Ushikawa see the two moons. At some point Tengo is thinking about all this and decides to ask his friend to look at the moon. Later he calls him again, but forgets to ask. Then he realizes that he forgot to ask, but doesn’t make a big deal out of it. It seems there’s a deliberate choice by the author to not blend in this contradiction. The two moons aren’t a reality of 1Q84, they aren’t an astronomical proven satellite with historical records. The second moon just seems a symbol flagging this alternate universe. Whoever sees the second moon is surprised. We never test this potential contradiction where two different characters look at the moon and potentially see or perceive different things.
P.P.P.P.S.
I forgot this one:
“Wedged between these many trucks, like a graceful antelope caught in a herd of clumsy rhinoceros, was a silver Mercedes-Benz coupe. Its beautiful body, looking fresh from the factory, reflected the newly risen morning sun. Its hubcaps had been color coordinated with the body. The car was an import, with its steering wheel on the left side. The driver’s window was down, and a well-dressed middle-aged woman was looking straight at Aomame.”
Later, Aomame has dreams about this same woman, being some kind of protector:
Aomame pondered the idea of God. God has no form, yet is able to take on any form. The image she had was of a streamlined Mercedes coupe, a brand-new car just delivered from the dealer. An elegant, middle-aged woman coming out of that car, in the middle of an expressway running through the city, offering her beautiful spring coat to the naked Aomame. To protect her from the chilly wind, and people’s rude stares. And then, without a word, getting back in her silver coupe. The woman knew—that Aomame had a baby within her. That Aomame had to be protected.
At the end of the book Aomame & Tengo hop on a taxi, and the guy driving gives them a story:
“Meanwhile, the passenger spied a friend of his. Around Komazawa, when we weren’t moving an inch, there was a silver Mercedes coupe next to us that just happened to be driven by a woman who was a friend of his. They rolled down the windows and chatted and she wound up inviting him to ride with her. The man apologized and asked if he could pay up and go over to her car. Letting a passenger out in the middle of a highway is unheard of, but since we actually weren’t moving, I couldn’t say no. So the man got into the Mercedes. He felt bad about it, so he added a little extra to what he paid to sweeten the deal. But still it was annoying. I mean, I couldn’t move at all. Anyway, bit by bit I made my way here, nearly to the Ikejiri exit. And then I saw you raising your hand. Pretty hard to believe, don’t you think?”
On one hand this confirms there are metaphysical protectors active in the story, moving in the background. There’s a good chance they they aren’t random figures, but are attached to “reincarnations,” since this is one hypothesis validated in the book (they can’t merely return to life, their interest have to be fully in service of someone else). On the other hand, this last section technically happens just past the threshold. This means that they aren’t anymore in 1Q84. Maybe. Because this still happens a while before, but at the very least it’s impactful on whatever world they step in. I would have guessed that by exiting 1Q84 they exit all trace of “fictional.” This seems to at least partially contradict this. But it’s not final, so it doesn’t amount to much…
