1Q84: Book 1 by Haruki Murakami.

3/5 rating. 387 pages.

Book #66 of 2021. Read November 28, 2021.

This book follows two storylines around Tengo and Aomame.

Tengo is a math teacher (what a guy!) and an amateur novelist who is approached by an editor friend to rewrite “Air Chrysalis”. This story was input into a new writer’s contest with the author being the ethereal, seventeen-year-old Fuka-Eri.

Aomame is a martial arts teacher who also moonlights as a silent assassin against deadbeat husbands. After taking a walk down from the highway to the street level which she is warned might change her perspective, she begins to realize that she has lost hold on reality and that she is not even sure when things in the world began to shift: like police wearing new pistols…or there being two moons.

As the story unfolds, these two storylines begin to converge and Tengo and Aomame start to connect, though not having actually met in the present.

Overall, so far, this book was intriguing and certainly had me wanting to keep reading: a real page-turner. But it still is missing that amazing quality yet in this 3-book story to rate it higher.

Quotes:

“But risk is the spice of life.”

“All he could do was deal with one small, concrete problem after another.”

“She might just as well have used something other than words, but she had not come across a more appropriate medium.”

“If someone asked Tengo a question, any question, he would do his best to answer it. He had probably been born that way.”

“‘I don’t get it,’ Tengo said. ‘You’d think they’d take special care of a kid with asthma, not bully her.’

‘It’s never that simple in the kids’ world,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Kids get shut out just for being different from everyone else. The same kind of thing goes on in the grown-up world, but it’s much more direct in the children’s world.’”

“It would have been a long story. And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words.”

“If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.”

“He spoke to break the silence.”

“Of course, something’s gonna kill everybody sooner or later.”

“Well, she seems to think she’s a special being that transcends classification.”

“Then she looked straight at Aomame with her lustrous black eyes. They were eyes that had witnessed much.”

“You are you and only you. I’m very grateful for that. More grateful than I can say.”

“They’re dainty little creatures that hardly exist at all: they come out of nowhere, search quietly for a few, limited things, and disappear into nothingness again, perhaps to some other world.”

“But inside, where she could not be seen, she was confused. In places of which she was totally unaware, things about which she was totally unaware were happening one after another. Until a short time before, she had had the world in her hand, without disruptions or inconsistencies. But now it was falling apart.”

“How much more fun it would be to have school every day without a break!“

“There existed such happy people in the world.”

“Tengo wondered if he could possibly reach that age with such a sense of enjoyment. Then he shook his head. No way.”

“An ominous sandstorm was developing somewhere on the plane of his emotions.”

“It’s not me but the world that’s deranged.”

“Her greatest joy in life was knowing that her importance to the team was by no means small and that, as narrow as that work might be, she had been granted a definite place in it. Someone needed her.”

“This was not about the mere loss of her virginity but rather the sanctity of an individual human being’s soul. No one had the right to invade such sacred precincts with muddy feet.”

“I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my prison. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key.”

“But I am beyond saving now.”

“Let’s leave doubt for tomorrow,”

“When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible. What you can eliminate from fiction is the description of things that most readers have seen.”

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life.”

“Whenever she came here, Aomame felt she was in another world. The air was heavy, and time had its own special way of flowing.”

“‘Even if we could turn back, we’d probably never end up where we started,’ the Professor said.”

“Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood.”

“Each of us has borne too great a burden in the course of our lives.”

“Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”

“No, I don’t have the slightest desire to rewrite the past or history or whatever. What I’d like to rewrite is the present, here and now.”

#1q84 #harukimurakami #books #bookstagram #read #reading #japan #japanese #tengo #aomame

IG Link.