Tengo reminds me of Toru Okada, the main character of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Indeed, the author is usually quite unhurried in his description of the characters and the minutiae of their daily lives. The characters in Murakami’s books are generally interesting and well defined. Needless to say, what follows is rife with spoilers. Somewhere along the way through 1Q84 I lost interest. The ingredients certainly all seemed to be there: strong main characters with a romantic connection (shades of Norwegian Wood), trademark “dream realism” (reminiscent of earlier works Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) but extrapolated to what seemed to be an entire parallel world and all played out over what promised to be a meaty plot spanning 3 books and 962 pages. And for the first few hundred pages, I thought I really would. As an admirer of Murakami’s work I really wanted to like 1Q84.
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