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I'm deeply moved by this novel. Some scenes in this book are really hard to bear. But its language is so strong and so beautiful in its coarseness, and the characters are so real and deeply tragic and unforgettable. Wow.

A long one, but held me until the end. Murakami does this thing with repetition: an idea or phrase is reiterated sometimes word-for-word at different times or different povs. Its obvious on the diction level but has a parallel in the larger scale of the story as well. It strings together a long strung out story and gives it consistency, familiarity. Murakami often lures the reader into familiarity even to the point of drip-feeding the clues to a coming plot point, dramatic irony appearing at the last moment. However, the familiarity is also a ruse, a way to shock the reader when something truly unprecedented is revealed. I appreciate the sympathetic powers in employ of Murakami's writing; characters who are hardly likeable in any easy sense are made intimately understandable even if we hate them at times. His stories often culminate in supernaturally charged climaxes and 1Q84 is no exception, but i feel he really outdid himself in this case of fates converging and veils thinning; the inexplicable phenomenon having such terrible power until the very end. In conclusion: Put a Tiger in Your Tank 👍🏻.

There's a million things one could say about this book. To me the most powerful choice was telling the story from the perspective of Klara. In her telling, there is a bareness; an absence of background and critical information that creates mystery and interest. She herself is not so much interested in this mystery. It's either irrelevant to her small picture life and/or simply unavailable to her. We witness in the absence of human drives and background, separate artificial drives that constellate into a different kind of sense. To Klara, the sun is a tangible, all powerful, sentient god; like to many of our ancestors and it guides her, she prays, she has faith. It feels both innocent like a child and pious as any religious person. Ishiguro seems to suggest that spirituality is basic; a sign of actual intelligence, and counterposes it to the venue scientific worldview that creates Klara and downplays intelligence as mere circuitry. I feel it bears reminding that scifi is not a reflection of the future or of actual possibilities, rather it elaborates on themes resonant in the present and in ourselves. That said, this isn't a story about AI, it's a story about the perennial question of soul and meaning. Objectively this is an incredible, tight story that is worth it for entertainment value alone if not for its deeper inquires.