I hear that his level of involvement in the design of the look of the book was higher than normal, and the odd, wax-paper like dust jacket with the 1-Q-8-4 face cutout is inspired.
The name is to be pronounced like the year 1984, with the letter "Q" replacing the word/syllable "nine", so like "Q-teen-eighty-four". But this makes much more sense in Japanese, where "9" is transcribed as "kyu" and their transcription of the Latin alphabet letter "Q" is "kew"; seeing the title as "1Q84" makes much more sense to a normal Japanese person, and is an obvious (to them) play on George Orwell's 1984, a novel mentioned more than once in this book.
1Q84 was originally published as three separate books in Japan, with the first two on the same day, and the third months later. In the UK, the first English edition was published as three separate books, and staggered in release the same as the Japanese versions. In America it was initially published all together, but I've seen it since as three paperbacks packaged in a box that resembles in appearance the edition I have.
Below, the separations between books can be seen by the dark lines roughly trisecting the work:
It's definitely a Murakami work. He's moved onto the third person for this, and that seemed to have angered some of the few critics who disliked this novel. For the first two books, he cycles between two characters with even regularity as we grow to see how they must be connected, and with each new chapter a new level of the story unfolds, causing even more confusion and loose ends. You know...Murakami.
For the first two books it's like a hot-rod, getting out onto the road, pushing on the gas, then mashing it down with vigor, the throttle opening up, the excitement rising, how can this possibly work out, and Book Two ends with a ridiculous cliffhanging climax. I know I'd have been furious if I'd had to wait months for the last third to come out.
Now, some of the things that make us love the Ruk-man, as I like to call him, also lead to some of the unsightly literary things he's forced to do. You know what I mean: creating worlds so fantastical and bizarre forces him into the occasional pages of expository blank-filling-ins. That's to be excused (for the most part), because his stories are so full of fun and life and excitement and philosophy--we fans begrudge him that.
The first two books of 1Q84 are mostly devoid of that kind of exposition, which is a testament to his abilities as a writer.
Then Book Three starts. That revving, pedal-to-the-medal hot-rod seems to have found itself without fuel, sitting in a mud pit it can't get out of. It's a hard thing for the Ruk-man to get himself out of. He's added a third character to lead chapters, a character that had maybe fifteen to twenty pages of face-time in the first two books, and its through this third character that we're supposed to put togther different aspects of the story, using him as a marker, since we, as readers, know more of the story, we can follow his progress and try and "solve" it ourselves.
But the world he's given us doesn't really require solving as it were. And then we've got our two leads, who we've been following for nearly 600 pages. Murakami's stories always have such a kinetic flow, a vibrant feeling of life rushing through everything, and in Book Three, our two lead characters are relegated to literally sitting and waiting, for nearly a hundred-thirty pages of a the two-hundred I've read so far. The Ruk-man knows that this doesn't make exciting reading, and tries to spruce it up. The details of their situations might help the context, but there's only so much you can do with your stars literally sitting and waiting.
I still want to know how it ends, how it ties together, see it come together, for sure, but I can honestly say that I would've finished it weeks ago had that momentum been preserved going forward. My own urgency evaporated with the novel's.
I would still definitely recommend this work. Murakami spent two years writing it, and I think it does a fine job of illustrating how an artist can pin themselves, and hopefully figure out how to pull it together at the end. The first two books are some of the most exciting Murakami work I can remember. The looming threat isn't as intimidating as it is perplexing, but that shouldn't be a knock on the story. That's more of the complicated nature of the threat-as-plot-device, but that itself could be a problem.
But hey: literary frauds, assassin personal trainers, wealthy dowagers running a home for battered women, a gay bodyguard, anarchic religious communes, a wily yet fugly investigator, a math teacher who also writes fiction, two moons in the sky, and the bad guys known only as The Little People...it could be just vintage Murakami.
I was also thinking of starting my next Pynchon themed post: "Women in Pynchonian Novels: Besides Prairie, Are They All Whores?"
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