Murakami - 1Q84 (1 of 23)
1Q84
Pages: 925
Started: 01 Jan 2024
Finished: 16 Jan 2024
Ratings
Mind Meltyness: 3/5
Tier List Ranking: C
Re-read?: No
Keywords
Solitude
Slow
Sensory
Hope
Lost Time
Cold surrealism
Unfinished weirdness
Town of Cats
Debrief
1Q84 felt both too long, yet not long enough. Part 3 was a slog.
There were many parts I liked, but many more parts that I disliked.
Too much repetition/overlap between perspectives for my taste. Character voicing was largely the same too; I couldn’t differentiate the characters if the names were redacted. Ending was flat like Aomame.
Comparison is the thief of joy, but 1Q84 was not as fantastical as WUBC or HBWATETW.
Witnessing two moons is like acknowledging something in life is lacking. It kind of represents being introspective. You can visit, but don’t dwell and get stuck. You need to move forward, even if some questions are unanswered.
Letting go of the past will free you.
Excerpts
(I forgot to mark where this line was, but I’m almost positive it’s in book 3)
All happiness is alike. But each pain is painful in its own way. - when that girl left, she left behind this void. No, maybe not. Maybe she just showed me something that was already there, inside me
Book 1: April-June
Chapter 15 > Page 231
What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?
Chapter 15 > Page 240
If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.
Chapter 22 > Page 357
He spent day after day feeling uneasy and muddled, like someone who has mistakenly swallowed a thick swatch of cloud.
Chapter 23 > Page 368
That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.
Chapter 23 > Page 368
The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now.
Book 2: July-September
Chapter 2 > Page 415
It takes both time and money to build up or discover something important. Of course, time and money are not in themselves a guarantee of great results, but they can’t hurt. The total amount of time available is especially limited. The clock is ticking as we speak. Time rushes past. Opportunities are lost right and left. If you have money, you can buy time. You can even buy freedom if you want. Time and freedom: those are the most important things that people can buy with money.
Chapter 3 > Page 438
You can’t choose how you’re born, but you can choose how you die.
Chapter 3 > Page 439
The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you.
Chapter 4 > Page 454
What Tengo would have to do, it seemed, was take a hard, honest look at the past while standing at the crossroads of the present. Then he could create a future, as though he were rewriting the past. It was the only way.
Chapter 5 > Page 459
Ayumi had a great emptiness inside her, like a desert at the edge of the earth. You could try watering it all you wanted, but everything would be sucked down to the bottom of the world, leaving no trace of moisture. No life could take root there. Not even birds would fly over it. What had created such a wasteland inside Ayumi, only she herself knew. No, maybe not even Ayumi knew the true cause.
Chapter 5 > Page 459
But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abyss of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it.
Chapter 5 > Page 460
Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically—on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke from a nightmare.
Chapter 6 > Page 482
Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or, then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away. Some announce their departure before they leave, while others just disappear all of a sudden without warning one day. And once you lose them you can never get them back. Your search for replacements never goes well. It’s all very painful—as painful as actually being cut with a knife.
Chapter 6 > Page 484
By the time the full reservoir of information reaches me, it’s squeezed down to a few droplets.
Chapter 8 > Page 498
Kindness was one of the things presently (or permanently) in short supply in the world.
Chapter 8 > Page 501
Cognitive disorders move ahead, never back.
Chapter 8 > Page 504
It is the place where he is meant to be lost.
Chapter 8 > Page 504
And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to bring him back to his original world.
Chapter 10 > Page 536
If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.
Chapter 11 > Page 550
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning.
Chapter 11 > Page 552
people have to pay a price for the gifts they are given.
Chapter 17 > Page 638
Once you’ve hidden something, you have to keep it hidden.
Chapter 17 > Page 641
It was at the same time both a special power or gift and a cruel burden. It was, I think, eating him alive from the inside.
Chapter 18 > Page 655
That ten-year-old girl grasped this hand and hugely changed something inside me, but I can’t give a reasonable explanation of how such a thing could have happened. Still, the two of us understood each other and accepted each other in a very natural way in every last particular—almost miraculously so. Such things don’t happen all that often in this life. For some people, they might never happen.
Chapter 19 > Page 679
Making friends with someone can only expose that person to danger. That is what it means to live beneath two moons.
Chapter 21 > Page 698
I was unable to live for myself: that possibility had already been stripped from me.
Chapter 23 > Page 719
Sorry, but I can’t wait any longer. My time is up. Let’s get the show on the road.
Chapter 24 > Page 721
In other words, the gears had advanced one more notch. There was nowhere else to move after this.
Chapter 24 > Page 725
He was drifting and unable to concentrate his energies on anything.
Book 3: October-December
Chapter 1 > Page 751
Any secret known by more than ten people isn’t a secret anymore.
Chapter 1 > Page 758
Who knew what his fate was, even two or three days down the road? So what was the point in worrying about how his health would be fifteen years from now?
Chapter 2 > Page 762
She stopped moving toward death because she had heard a distant voice. At that point, she was in a soundless space. From the moment she put pressure on the trigger, all noise around her vanished. She was wrapped in silence, as if at the bottom of a pool. Down there, death was neither dark nor fearful. Like amniotic fluid to a fetus, it was natural, self-evident. This isn’t so bad, Aomame thought, and almost smiled. That was when she heard a voice.
Chapter 5 > Page 799
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Chapter 5 > Page 800
This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.
Chapter 5 > Page 801
Just a touch more. One more centimeter. No, if I pull my finger just five millimeters toward me, I will shift over to a silent world where there are no more worries. The pain will only last an instant. And then there will be a merciful nothingness.
Chapter 7 > Page 826
There are ways to pry open the door. What is more difficult is making sure you close it afterward.
Chapter 9 > Page 863
“The biggest problem when it comes to being reborn,” the small nurse said, as if revealing a secret, “is that people aren’t reborn for their own sakes. They can only do it for someone else.”
Chapter 9 > Page 863
But you know, unless you die once, you won’t be reborn.
Chapter 10 > Page 868
most people in the world don’t really use their brains to think. And people who don’t think are the ones who don’t listen to others.
Chapter 10 > Page 877
Your profession really molds you
Chapter 16 > Page 959
It’s like watching some rare exotic butterfly. Pleasant to watch, but you can’t touch it, for as soon as you do, it dies, its brilliance gone.
Chapter 17 > Page 969
I don’t know how to put it exactly, but there is a sense of time wavering irregularly when you try to forge ahead. If what is in front is behind, and what is behind is in front, it doesn’t really matter, does it. Either way is fine.
Chapter 18 > Page 998
He had been feeling for some time that he was caught up in a strong current, one that never wavered. And that current was dragging him off to some unknown place.
Chapter 20 > Page 1032
taking care of three items at once isn’t easy. Like it or not, you end up prioritizing.
Chapter 21 > Page 1035
It was like—a windless day at the end of autumn, when a single leaf falls from a tree.
Chapter 21 > Page 1054
“Your father must have really liked his job. Going around collecting NHK subscription fees.” “I don’t think it’s a question of liking or disliking it,” Tengo said. “Then what?” “It was the one thing he was best at.” “Hmm. I see,” Kumi said. She pondered this. “But that might very well be the best way to live your life.” “Maybe so,” Tengo said as he looked out at the pine windbreak. It might really be so.
Chapter 24 > Page 1077
Your father may have had a secret that he took with him to the other side. And that seems to be causing you confusion. I think I can understand how you feel. But you shouldn’t peep anymore into that dark entrance. Leave that up to cats. If you keep doing so, you will never go anywhere. Better to think about the future.
Chapter 25 > Page 1091
if we die today, we do not have to die tomorrow, so let us look to the best in each other.
Chapter 25 > Page 1095
No man is capable enough to live forever.
Chapter 26 > Page 1098
A certain amount of ambition helps a person grow.
Chapter 29 > Page 1135
We call this world by different names, Aomame thought. I call it the year 1Q84, while he calls it the cat town. But it all means the same thing.
Chapter 31 > Page 1150
Sometimes our memory betrays us.