REVIEW | "1Q84 - Books One and Two" by Haruki Murakami

Title: 1Q84 - Books One and Two
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage (8/2/2012)
Genre: adult fiction
ISBN: 978-0099549062
Page Number: 816 pages






Blurb
The year is 1Q84.
This is the real world, there is no doubt about that.
But in this world, there are two moons in the sky.
In this world, the fates of two people, Tengo and Aomame, are closely intertwined. They are each, in their own way, doing something very dangerous. And in this world, there seems no way to save them both.
Something extraordinary is starting.

Execution
When I first started this book, it was incredibly hard for me to get invested in the story. I could only read one chapter at a time and even that was quite hard to get through. So I put the book down and started it again later and this time, it just clicked with me. I don't know what had happened, but all of a sudden I was very much invested in the story and read it relatively quickly. There is just something about Murakamis writing that makes you fall down the rabbit hole and get you enthralled by the story in a way that you can't really describe. I still don't know what it is that makes me love this book so much because no doubt, this is one of the weirdest books I've ever read, but it just drew me in and hasn't let me go ever since.
Murakami must be a genius for how perfectly everything fits together in this book. It is very detailed but nothing is there by chance and although on first sight it all seems like one big mess, it all falls into place at some point and makes perfectly sense.
This is one of those books you could describe as much as you want and yet never do justice to it. It is a book you have to read yourself in order to understand what it is about.

Characters
Though there are many more characters in the story, I want to concentrate on the two protagonists, Tengo and Aomame. Taking turns, they narrate the story and both contribute to crucial events happening in the book.
Both of them are very well crafted and complex, you can imagine them as real people living a real life just perfectly.
Aomame is a very accounting and accurate, she is a person you imagine never makes any mistakes in her life and she is also very distant from the life around herself. She has problems bonding herself to other people and seems very cold at first sight.
Tengo, on the other hand, seems rather warm and emotional; he is a talented writer and I imagined him as a dreamy and yet somehow thoughtful person (see what I mean when I say this book is very hard to describe?).
In the end, their characters are very different from one another and yet they are connected on a very profound level.

Emotions
I felt a lot reading this book. I can't even pinpoint exactly what it was that I felt (again, hard to describe) but essentially, this book made me feel something, and this something was a lot.
I was (I still am) very invested in the story and more so, the characters, and I desperately want to read the last book to find out what will happen to them.

Overall
Altogether, I think Haruki Murakami has created a masterpiece. This review does not do it justice but I still hope you could kind of grasp how I felt about the book. "1Q84" is definitely one of my favorites now and I can't wait to read more books by Murakami.