Inverarity is not a Scottish village

Passive protagonist passively bangs every female character, climaxing (pun intended) with the manic pixie Action Girl.

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 - "Q" is for "question mark". A world that bears a question.

Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame's and Tengo's narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell's, 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami's most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

( Murakami is more fixated on his penis than any other author I've read, and I've read Roth, Rushdie, Bellow, Faulkner, Updike, Heinlein, and Piers Anthony. )

Also by Haruki Murakami: My reviews of Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

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My complete list of book reviews.

An old man who talks to cats vs. a whiskey-drinking cat-killer named Johnny Walker, and a teenager named Kafka who runs away to live in a library and talks to a voice in his head named Crow. WTF, it's Haruki Murakami.

Kafka on the Shore follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters. Kafka Tamura runs away from home at 15, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. Their parallel odysseys are enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerising dramas. Cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghostlike pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since WWII. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle.

Murakami's new novel is at once a classic tale of quest, but it is also a bold exploration of mythic and contemporary taboos, of patricide, of mother-love, of sister-love. Above all it is an entertainment of a very high order.

( Magical realism: it's all about the penis. )

Verdict: Fantasy by any other name, but a peculiar surrealistic fantasy blending dreams and parallel worlds with modern Japan. The magic is all unexplained plot devices while the characters are the center of the story. Haruki Murakami is like sushi, an acquired taste that some love and others will never stop gagging over. This was not my favorite Murakami novel, but it was still entertaining and interesting and weird in a good but uncomfortable way. But he also kind of reminds me of Piers Anthony, if Piers Anthony could write and actually had meaningful and interesting things to say: the line between "fun and magical story" and "perverse" can disappear in a hurry.

Also by Haruki Murakami: My reviews of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

One-line summary: Unemployed loser Toru Okada goes on a trip to rival Alice's when his wife disappears, but his rabbit-hole is a well, the vanishing cat shares his evil brother-in-law's name, and his quest is weirder and bloodier.



Vintage, 1997 (in English; first published in 1994 in Japan), 613 pages. Translated by Jay Rubin.

Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.

In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.

3 books in one volume: The Thieving Magpie, Bird as Prophet, The Birdcatcher. This translation by Jay Rubin is in collaboration with the author.

( Something about wells and wigs and war crimes in Manchuria and psychic prostitutes and haunted houses, all swirling around the most annoyingly passionless protagonist you've ever wanted to see dropped down a well and left there. )

Verdict: This is a strange, surreal story of domestic disruption, horrific war crimes, dark deeds vaguely described, and metaphysical experiences, written in a prose style that may not appeal to everyone. You might call it a hero's quest to uncover a mystery in a world of magical realism, or maybe that's trying to force a Western paradigm onto it. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle frustrated me at times, but it was worth reading, and keeps me fascinated by Murakami's writing.

I did not read this book for the books1001 challenge (I happened to be reading it already), but it is one of the books on the list of 1001 literary novels we are trying to read and review before the end of the year, and it could be yours! Join us for a reading challenge that will introduce you to books you likely would never have read, and enjoy YA-vampire-romance-free reviews.

What's this? Inverarity reviewing something that's not SF/Fantasy? Well, yeah, I've been feeling like my reading choices have been rather narrow in recent years. SFF is always going to be my favorite genre, but I used to read more broadly, so I'm trying to sample stuff outside my usual range. And since I've been pretty down on the literary genre, I've been looking for something that actually appeals to me.

So, Haruki Murakami. I chose him almost at random. I'd never actually heard of him until recently, but he's a very Big Name Author in Japan, and he has quite a significant international following as well. So not only did I choose a random book by an author I'm unfamiliar with, but it's a literary novel translated from the original Japanese.

( A beautiful story about depressing, boring people )