N.L. Brisson's Reviews > 1Q84

Reading Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 is a true labor of love. The length of the book is daunting, 925 pages. In fact it is so lengthy and the print is so small that I sent the print edition back to the library and got the CD editions. The book sprawls over 38 CD’s and requires a huge investment of time, but these CD’s saved my old eyes from weeks of perpetual squinting and it is sometimes quite delightful to have someone read to you. (Warning: this book has very graphic description of body parts, sexual encounters, and sexual thoughts so it might be embarrassing if your neighbors can hear you listening to it, and is not appropriate for children.) In spite of all these caveats I never once thought about not finishing the book. IQ84 is a truly unusual and absorbing novel. Haruki Murakami is an amazing writer who tells every detail necessary to make the people and the events come to life and not one detail that seems extraneous.

The story is a love story, but the most bizarre love story you will probably ever read. Aomame and Tengo knew each other in grade school and have not seen each other since, but they are soul mates and it will take almost the entire 925 pages to reunite them. The story takes place in the year 1984. Aomame gets out of a cab in a traffic jam on a major highway near an ESSO billboard that admonishes everyone to “Put a Tiger in Your Tank”, and climbs down an emergency staircase so that she can be on time for a very important ( and shocking) appointment. At the bottom of the staircase she enters a parallel universe 1 (Q) (meaning question mark) 84, still Tokyo, but a Tokyo with two moons.
What follows would make a perfect anime (or manga) movie, but would be just as interesting as a movie with real actors. A seventeen-year-old girl runs away from her father who is Leader in a secretive religious community. She co-authors a book exposing the secret heart of this religion. Tengo anonymously edits the book. Chaos and suspense ensue, chaos and suspense which eventually connects Tengo and Aomame, two people who met as children because they were each hauled around every Sunday by parents on a mission. Aomame’s parents belonged to a religious sect that would be the equivalent of our Jehovah’s Witnesses and Tengo’s dad collected payments for THK, the government run cable network. Both hated having to tag along on these Sundays and were deeply embarrassed by what their parent felt they had to do.

There is a strong fantasy storyline in this novel, the story of the little people and the air chrysalis, a story that you will recognize as a sort of variation on the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” theme. By the end of the book you will have no idea who is a Dotta and who is a Mossa (I have no idea if these are spelled correctly which is one of the problems with reading an audio book.) That’s all I will say about this because I don’t want this to be a spoiler piece. You will also meet the Dowager and her wonderful assistant, who run a sanctuary for abused women and one of the most tenacious investigators, Oshikawa (sp?), the bobble-headed misfit who turns out to be a real pit bull, intent on finding Aomame for reasons I cannot reveal to you. Buzz Cut and Pony Tail also do their bits to add menace to the entire complex tale. Wonderful!