With having a bum ankle for the last 6 months, I've found many hours of refuge in reading books and taking my mind off of not being able to run and play like I've done before.
The first book I'd like to review is Haruki Murakami's 1Q84.
In the past I have not read many fiction books and John recommended me this book so I decided to start reading it. Fortunately, I was able to check it out from the U library thanks to Roqayah's student access to the library.
This will be a super brief summary of the story and what I remember. This book left many loose-ends with me which upon reading book reviews and seeing similar thoughts, I felt comforted knowing it wasn't my inability to figure out the many mysteries in the book.
The book begins by alternating stories by chapter between characters that the next 1000 or so pages will be about. The first chapter begins introducing a female named Aomame (meaning green beans) in Japanese whose job is to kill men who are abusive to women. She begins by going down a stairwell exit off the highway, somehow entering a different world that she names 1Q84 instead of 1984.
The next chapter features a male character named Tengo who is a cram-school teacher and aspiring writer.
It was an interesting format to go between character stories on alternate chapters and was fun to try to connect the seemingly unrelated stories as they became more intertwined and foreshadowed similarities between the two.
While I was reading this book, I decided it would be helpful to write a brief chapter synopsis after each chapter to help me keep up with the main ideas of the chapters and to write questions that were left in my head. I felt this strategy for reading to be very helpful because it forced me to thoughtfully think about what I had just read instead of simply plowing through the book with a shallow level of understanding.
A fun thing that John did for this book was bring it to life by looking into some of the things featured in it. For example, more than once in the book, the drink "Tom Collins" appears. John researched what this drink was an actually bought the ingredients for it. It includes Gin, Lemon Juice, Club Soba, Sugar/Honey, and a Lemon Slice for garnish. It was fun goofing off about this drink for a while.
It's tough trying to summarize this but..Aomame continues to kill men while living out her normal life as a personal trainer. Tengo decides to re-write a book called Air Chrysalis for a strange beautiful high-school girl named Fuka-Eri to win a literary competition. It wins and creates more problems than could have been anticipated.
First of all, the "fiction" story that Fuka-Eri wrote was actually a recount of her bizarre childhood in an extreme religious cult. She was locked into a shed with a goat and mini-creatures came out of the goat's mouth and created an "air chrysalis".
The book Fuka-Eri "wrote" receives negative attention because for some reason, "the voice" from someone/something stops contacting the religious cult and members from the that cult track down Tengo and his advisor Komatsu demanding them to stop publishing the book.
Meanwhile, Aomame gets hired by the Dowager for another killing. This time it's The Leader of that religious cult that Fuka-Eri used to belong to. Even though The Leader was aware that Aomame was sent to kill him, he allowed her to do it and even begged her to.
Simultaneously, on that stormy night in Tengo's life, his body froze and Fuka-Eri had sex with him.
Somehow, the act of Tengo having sex with Fuka-Eri impregnated Aomame in the other story.
The Dowager hides Aomame in a safe house so that the religious cult could not find her. Conveniently, it is in the same town that Tengo lives in and she even sees him sitting at the park looking up at the sky at one point but decides not to say anything.
We found out at one point in the book that Tengo and Aomame were classmates and for whatever reason, they have been irresistibly attracted to each other since 3rd grade elementary school despite being 30 now.
At the beginning of the book, after Aomame leaves into the year 1Q84 instead of 1984 she begins seeing two moons. At a later point in the book, Tengo also begins to see two moons, signifying that he is also in the alternative life 1Q84.
The book was broken up in books 1 and 2 within the first hardcopy I read and book 3's format changed a little bit with adding a 3rd character into the alternating chapters/characters. The new character Ushikawa, was hired by the religious cult to find out where Aomame was. Ushikawa somehow discovers the link between Aomame and Tengo and decides to spy on Tengo thinking that would lead him to Aomame. Aomame's Dowager's employee killed Ushikawa right before Ushikawa was able to get his hands on Aomame.
If I come back to this review and don't understand much of what I'm reading, it's because I didn't understand much of it while I was reading and after even upon finishing the book..
The book ends with Aomame and Tengo meeting and leaving the alternative world of 1Q84 back up the stairwell that caused Aomame to change worlds and back into 1984.
Reading this summary without reading the book would be pretty silly. Haha.
Lots of details are within the pages and I was always left trying to guess the link between the two stories.
I think this book was a little dense for me hopping into fiction cold-turkey.
In the meantime with future books, I plan on writing chapter summaries to help focus the book.
Right now I'm reading Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Lives by the Year 2100.
Will just be writing some of my feelings of the book and thoughts I had while reading.
We will see how this blog unfolds.
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