Haruki Murakami

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and that basic tone has hardly changed. 1Q84 ?is a novel braided in the tradition of Dickens, its chapters moving between separate but converging story lines. Aomame, the first character we meet, is a martial-arts instructor by vocation and an assassin on the side; she soon becomes aware that she?s entered a separate, parallel world she designates 1Q84. Tengo, the hero of the interwoven story that runs contrapuntally against hers, is a cram-school math teacher by day and aspiring novelist by night; an editor friend asks him to doctor and revise a novella written by a troubled and beautiful 17-year-old girl, Fuka-Eri, so she can win a literary prize. Aomame joins up with a simpatico policewoman to undertake random acts of promiscuous seduction and a wealthy dowager to kill off sex-crime perpetrators. Tengo gets tangled in a scheme to lure Fuka-Eri?s early-childhood tormentors to light. The two plotlines, and two characters, come together in a love-story convergence set in motion by their mutual investigation of a strange, remote cult.

And yet for all of its plotting flourishes, 1Q84 reads, paragraph-to-paragraph, as some of Murakami?s weakest writing in years. Obvious things are overexplained. (?If we're through choosing, we'd better close the menus,? Aomame at one point instructs. ?Otherwise the waiter will never come.?) Figurative language is often forced. (?Little children might pee in their pants, the impact of her frown was so powerful,? goes one description.) And when the book?s frenetically evolving plot requires explanation, as if often does, much of the crucial data is simply dropped into the mouths of characters:

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