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1Q84 is probably my favourite Murakamai book so far.

I believe this is a direct quotation from Murakami's memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The whole book is worth a read, especially if you liked this article.

If you want to read an actual novel by him, I highly recommend 1Q84, which is an engaging and somewhat surreal story.

1Q84 was the only novel that I've had to "speed read". It was several hundred pages too long.

My least favorite book of all time has to be The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford.

Recent reads that I recommend: N.K. Jemison's Broken Earth Trilogy. Alix Harrow's Ten Thousand Doors of January. Madeline Miller's Circe. Murakami's 1Q84.

Although with a little more thought, 1Q84 might be more upsetting now than it was last year.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing, I'm excited to take a look at some of the examples you mentioned!

Side comment, but somewhat related: I just started getting into reading and the most recent book I finished was Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I just started 1Q84, also by Murakami. Those books really do something to my brain when I read them. Ever since I got into it, I've had these strange desires to write a book of my own, but since I have no experience in the matter, I was thinking of clever ways to procedurally generate plot points, then let a randomizer run in a loop until it generates something interesting.

For example, in multiple arrays, you could create lists for different plot elements: ex: "main character is a " [student, engineer, pilot, detective]. You can do something for physical features as well, and personality traits, and generate completely randomized characters. Then, you could do something for the plot as well... If I were able to do this as a starting point, I could write a story by filling in the blanks, so to speak...

So, is there a popular forum or perhaps Twitter that all of these enthusiasts hang out at? =D

True, 1984 is not included in any Chinese textbook. Chinese education system is not the best. We have literature related classes from primary school to high school but they don't include many western works (well translation is one factor I can see). And the way teachers teach them is very very test orientated. We have a big test after highschool called Gaokao which is almost the only factor to decide which college you can go to. Many ppl spend their entire highschool prep for that one test. (There are schools specialized for students retaking this test after they failed the first time, and it takes 1 year to retake.)

During college there's no mandatory literature courses anymore but I was exposed to many western work during that time in my spare time. One reason was I was trying hard to learn English. But I can see many people dont have the incentives to read those even if those works are famous even in China. Many STEM college students in China start to prep for studying overseas once they step into college and all they care is GPA + a good Toefl/GRE score (and there are faster ways of getting good scores for those other than reading literature).

I dare to say many of those STEM students become the friends and coworkers you guys have in US today and they probably haven't "wasted" much time on pondering issues outside of STEM fields or getting their own lives to a better place.

Edit: not appearing in literature textbooks doesn't mean it's not famous or popular in mainland China. Haruki Murakami is also a very popular author whose work is not included in textbooks. He has a book called 1Q84 which was very popular and many Chinese got interested in 1984 because of it.

I read the 3 tomes of 1Q84 (translation) in one day or two and while the first one was good, I found the two others were boring: every mystery or expectation he rose wasn't met in the end. That was a frustrating read.

For text in Japanese I only read a few pages in class and during exam and that wasn't relevant to my interest either: the style is flat and he use to many loan words from English. Up to that point I wonder where his success come from because I really don't get the appeal of his work (from what I read).

I read Norwegian Wood and 1Q84, and those got me hooked.

Apples and oranges though. Murakami writes symbolic surrealism. A far-cry from down-to-earth (rome?), politically driven scifi. I think 1Q84 is possibly his worst work. He aimed for the moon and the rocket blew up on the launch pad. Normally I really like his works, but reading 1Q84 revealed his plot mechanisms for what they are e.g. loosely connected rabbit holes with no resolution. I think I ignored that fact in most of his other books because there was emotional closure paving over the plot cracks, but it just didn't happen for 1Q.

To be fair, "nothing happening" can equally well describe much of the Western post-modern literary tradition.

I think one thing that sets Murakami apart is the earnest simplicity of his writing. His writing seemingly doesn't attempt to manipulate the reader, and it doesn't seem to aim beyond high school English in complexity. It's workmanlike, unaffected, and personal. To me, it brings to mind John Williams (Stoner) and Karl Ove Knausgaard (who is admittedly a much more capable prose stylist).

In his earlier works, the simplicity feels a bit... simple. But in hi later, more mature works, he doesn't shy away from going into detail about the sheer mundaneness of living. I haven't read 1Q84, but the first book to really deserve the stereotype of Murakami as being about single guys with cats lounging about in empty apartments while waiting for the pasta to boil is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the core theme of which is figuring out reality, and by the extension, life. It's a work where the economy of style meets an economy of plot (even though it's actually a complex plot!) perfectly, and it's a masterpiece.

I've never been to Japan, but I find his other concerns you mention — isolation and so on — to be just as relevant in other social-democratic cultures (perhaps the US less so).