I take the Aunt camp's opinion further. 1Q84 is among the worst pieces of fiction I've read. The three books in the trilogy were my first reading of Murakami and remain the only books of his that I've read. I've looked around for opinions on his magnum opus and everyone seems to give different opinions. I bought Norwegian Wood and will sit down and read it eventually, but 1Q84 left a very bad taste in my mouth and I can't really encourage anyone to read it.

I don't know how far elizabeth is, but Book 1 was better than the two sequels. My first concern was probably the flatness of the writing. This was particularly obvious in the internal monologues of Tengo and Aomame which were so detached that they distanced themselves from any form of psychology or characterisation and instead bordered on stripped point-of-view narrative on the plot. This turned out to be a major issue as the main plot focus was on the separation of Aomame and Tengo, who seemed passionless, rigid, robotic, etc.

I might even be able to see the appeal of it as some kind of Tolstoyan statement on the meaningless of individuals in the march of history if Aomame and Tengo actually did something worth talking about in their time. Particularly in Book 3, and this is very meta-, the book just becomes a discussion of these two reading the newspaper, Proust, Dostovesky, Chekhov... When I finished the series, this ubiquitous intertextuality served as a grand list of authors I'd really rather have put time towards in lieu of Murakami.