It took me seven days, at roughly two hours a day, to finish Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.
I had heard of the novel many years ago, even before Han Han published 1988: I Want to Talk to the World. As the story goes, he had originally wanted to call his own book 1988, but because 1Q84 already existed, he ended up choosing that long, awkward title to set it apart.
What surprised me most was not just finally reading 1Q84, but how quickly I got through it. Three thick volumes should have felt like a long commitment, yet the novel is so compelling that the pages move almost on their own. From the very beginning, Murakami fills the story with questions and suspends them just out of reach, making it hard not to keep going just to find out what is really happening.
If I hadn’t already known the author, I might not have guessed this was a Murakami novel at all. It feels somewhat like a detective story shaped by magical realism, and in that sense it differs quite a bit from the style I associated with his earlier work.
After finishing it, my strongest impression was simply that Murakami really knows how to write a novel. The carefulness of his thinking, the precision of the structure, the way the language steadily draws the reader forward—those abilities are rare. Very few writers in the world today, in my view, can do this so well.
That said, the book itself is not without flaws. Some chapters feel a little too wordy, and some details are more explicit than they need to be. Even so, taken as a whole, it is absolutely a novel worth reading.
What is maddening, though, is that even by the end Murakami never properly gives you the answers you have been waiting for. That is the infuriating side of him. But then again, this is a novel: fiction by nature. Maybe clear-cut answers are not really the point.