Crooked
I never expected 1Q84 to unsettle me as quickly as it did. There wasn’t anything dramatic to make me sit on the edge of my seat. Rather, the uneasiness lingered, settling deep into my gut long after I had finished reading for the day. Nothing overtly shocking particularly happened in the opening, yet the book feels morosely misaligned, and I can’t quite dust it off. Part of this unease begins with Tengo. He’s introspective, thoughtful, and in some respects, almost gentle. However, the more time I spend in his perspective, the more I resist him. He moves through and participates in situations that seemingly should carry more weight than they do, and the reader, at least from my perspective, is left to bear the weight of that alone. He’s intensely reflective but not very resistant, especially when he ought to be, but somehow remains unjudgemental. The narrative by no stretch tries to sell his actions as right, but it expresses no concern about whether he’s wrong. That absence is heavy.
If Tengo creates ethical unease, which in my reading he most certainly will, then Aomame creates something stranger still, something appearing more physical. Her perspective pays particular attention to her facial expression, her frown specifically. This being said, the description is almost vague and isolated, that it begins to feel off. Not overly exaggerated, but it feels like the frown is being observed under a microscope. At times, it could almost read as monstrous. I know that this is a harsh word to use, but it’s not so much what is described as to how. The repetition, subtle distortion, the overall lack of emotional translation all make for something human but something unreadable. And this is what makes it so unnerving to me.
Then there is the world itself, where small things begin to shift. A detail in the news doesn’t line up. A minute police detail feels unfamiliar. Nothing has changed dramatically, but enough feels different to become disorienting. Aomame is the first to notice this, and she’s also the first to name it “1Q84”. It feels less like a discovery and more like an effort to stabilize something that’s already slipped. Nothing is entirely wrong per se, but nothing is entirely right, and naming it neglects to explain it. Tengo is ethically passive, and Aomame’s expressions are uncanny. The world begins operating on rules that seem almost, yet not quite, the same. The novel seems to act like a crooked painting on a wall.
The book, as I mentioned, names these things, but fails to explain them. There’s no clear moral anchor, no definitive confirmation that the world has in fact changed, and thus no indication that these tensions will resolve. Instead, it demands that the reader sits in this uncertainty. It’s like this reality doesn’t explain itself, or owe any explanations to anyone. What happens when we find ourselves in a world like this?
