Rather than a large, overt bringer of doom, we get a small, mysterious power that is “steadily undermining” us. But they seem to be steadily undermining us. We can’t even tell whether they are good or evil, or whether they have any substance or not. Instead, these so-called Little People have come on the scene…The Little People are an invisible presence. There’s no longer any place for a Big Brother in this real world of ours.

The big fantastical element in 1Q84 is the Little People, a kind of ideological foil to Orwell’s Big Brother: His brand of magical realism is potent indeed, even if it fails to bear fruit in this particular instance. The novel slowly brings them back together after this long period of estrangement, by way of a bizarre sequence of events that won’t surprise any regular Murakami reader. They have a shared past, but haven’t seen each other in twenty years. My dissatisfaction with the last book marred my reading of the other two, and made me feel that 1Q84, all things considered, is a better example of a literary failure than anything else.ġQ84 is the story of Tengo and Aomame, two people living in Tokyo in 1984. Books 1 and 2 were on par with the best of Murakami’s other writings, but Book 3 was a major letdown. This nearly-thousand-page novel is comprised of three books, and unfortunately I will be reviewing them as a single work. Haruki Murakami is among my favorite living writers, and I always relish the opportunity to return to his weird psychological landscapes. 1Q84 made a big splash in the literary world when the English translation was released in 2011, but only recently did I get around to reading it.

1q84 review