1Q84: Book 3 by Haruki Murakami.

4/5 rating. 414 pages.

Book #68 of 2021. Read December 19, 2021.

This is the third and final book and boy are things happening!

Ushikawa, the slimy, ugly man who has been tasked with finding Aomame has reasoned out the connection between her and Tengo. While even they don’t know how close in location they are, Ushikawa is searching desperately for Aomame.

More and more crazy connections are constantly being made between the characters while real-life and fiction are becoming blurred.

Aomame and Tengo’s already intertwining lives finally come to a head when they finally meet. The hopeless romantic in me cheered for joy when this happened. Now it’s just up to them to see if they can escape 1Q84 and the people trying to hunt them down.

All 3 books of this are incredibly thought-provoking and left me constantly wondering if there were connections between things. While reading the entire 3 books are quite an undertaking, with how this book ends, I definitely really enjoyed all 1,167 of the series!

There are still a lot of questions that I have left, but I think these are ideas to ponder, as opposed to plots unfulfilled.

Quotes:

“Any secret known by more than ten people isn’t a secret anymore.”

“With great knowledge comes great responsibility.”

“Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”

“All other women were faint shadows in comparison.”

“When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.“

“Maybe that’s the responsibility I have to bear, the price I have to pay.”

“Though people had their own ways of being drunk.”

“He was already thirty, but yet to have a sense of himself as an adult. It just felt to him like he had spent thirty years in the world.”

“Abundant talent is like a rich vein of water underground that finds all sorts of places to gush forth.”

“All women have the right to give birth. We have to protect that right as much as we can.”

“If you do anything out of the ordinary, you can be sure someone, somewhere, will get upset.”

“I don’t know what kind of life you had, what sorts of joys and sorrows you experienced. But even if there was something that left you unfulfilled, you can’t go around seeking it at other people’s doors.”

“Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off.”

“A new day had barely begun and yet they already looked fed up and exhausted.”

“‘We’ll each go back to our own peaceful, mundane lives. No rapids, no waterfalls. We’ll quietly grow old. Any objection?’ ‘We don’t have any other choice do we?’ Komatsu stretched out the wrinkles next to his nose with his finger. ‘That’s right. We have no other choice.’”

“When that girl left, she left behind this void. No, maybe not. Maybe she just showed me something that was already there, inside me.”

“But I do need to show the world what I’m capable of.”

“If there was a glimmer of hope, he clung to it desperately.”

“As always, nothing big was going on – no, actually, lots of big events were happening in the world.”

“Tamaki was different: she had a natural, cheerful smile. People meeting her for the first time immediately felt friendly toward her. In the end, though, disappointment and despair drove Tamaki to take her own life, leaving Aomame – who couldn’t manage a decent smile – behind.”

“People naturally pay their respects to the dead. The person had, after all, just accomplished the personal, profound feat of dying.”

“How wonderful it would be if Aomame were here, he thought, just holding my hand tight, not saying a word.”

“Society might see his father’s entire life as amounting to almost zero, but to Tengo, it wasn’t next to nothing.”

“But for a thirty-year-old in good health, death was something far off, beyond the imagination.”

“I think we should help him make his wish come true. Don’t you think so?”

“A lonely man to begin with, he was now even lonelier.”

“Finally sleep came, silently, like smoke, and wrapped her in its embrace.”

“What was more important was that a person had vanished from the face of the earth, and those left behind had to grasp what that entailed.”

“A certain amount of ambition helps a person grow.”

“Without that prefatory knowledge, if they were suddenly together, just the two of them, she couldn’t imagine what she should say. The thought made it hard to breathe, and her mind went blank. There were too many things. Still, when it came down to it, perhaps nothing needed to be said. The things she most wanted to tell him would lose their meaning the moment she put them into words.”

“Tengo is looking for me. That’s all I need to know.“

“If you call not being able to see Aomame anymore something dangerous, then yes, there is definitely danger involved.”

“Just as I’ve been thinking of her, she’s been thinking of me. Tengo could hardly believe it – that in this frantic, labyrinth-like world, two people’s hearts – a boy’s and a girl’s – could be connected, unchanged, even though they hadn’t seen each other for twenty years.”

“If Aomame wanted to move on somewhere with him, there was nothing to keep him from going.”

“Like the clouds on the wind, he was in no hurry. If things took time, he didn’t mind.”

“The two of them didn’t know it at the time, but this was the only truly complete place in the entire world.”

“Twenty years was a long time. But Tengo knew that if he were to meet Aomame in another twenty years, he would feel the same way he did now. Even if they were both over fifty, he would still feel the same mix of excitement and confusion in her presence. His heart would be filled with the same joy and certainty.”

“If she let go she might never find him again.”

“If only I could have met you again a long time ago, then I wouldn’t have had to take all these detours to get here.”

“This is exactly the right time. For both of us.”

“He would be holding her close from now on, a thought that made him happier than he could imagine.”

#harukimurakami #1q84 #japan #fiction #novels #part3 #bigbooks #bookreviews #bookrecommendations #books #bookstagram #read #reading

IG Link.