Over 900 pages ..., it’s an enormously readable (if oppressively slow) novel that offers a narrative experience few other authors could achieve. But it is also a depressing, dark, morally questionable book that suggests the author has lost his way.

...

And when, after 900 pages of crepuscular sex scenes alternated with sentimental thoughts about adolescent sexuality, the novel turns out to be a shaggy dog story, it no longer seems a guilty pleasure but instead a tremendous waste of the reader’s time.

Even at a daunting 932 pages, Japanese cult superstar Haruki ­Murakami's breathlessly awaited 1Q84 is one of those books that ­disappear in your hands, pulling you into its mysteries with such speed and skill that you don't even notice as the hours tick by and the mountain of pages quietly shrinks.

You could say that the units with which he builds his fiction aren’t words and sentences but emblems and actions, storytelling elements that are, if not pre-literary, then extra-literary. Sanding off the surface texture of the language only makes the lines of this underlying structure more visible and immediate. Translation is at the center of what Murakami does; not a translation from one tongue to another, but the translation of an inner world into this, the outer one. Very few writers speak the truths of that secret, inner universe more fluently.

"1Q84" is a big, sprawling novel, a shaggy dog story to be sure, but it achieves what is perhaps the primary function of literature: to reimagine, to reframe, the world.

[The professional reviews show there is] no consensus, opinions all over the place.

Do Murakami's stories themselves make people feel as if their lives have some meaning? Some critics are unsure what to make of him, the prejudice being that a writer who is so popular, particularly among young people, cannot really be that good, even if he is now quoted at short odds each year to win the Nobel prize for literature. But Murakami's success speaks to a hunger for what he is doing that is unusual. Most characters in the modern commercial genre called "literary fiction" take for granted a certain unexamined metaphysics and worry exclusively about the higher-level complexities of circumstance and relationships. Throughout Murakami's oeuvre, on the other hand, his characters never cease to express their bafflement about the nature of time, or change, or consciousness, or moral choice, or the simple fact of finding themselves alive, in this world or another. In this sense, Murakami's heroes and heroines are all philosophers. It is natural, then, that his work should enchant younger readers, to whom the problems of being are still fresh, as well as others who never grew out of such puzzlements – that his books should seem an outstretched hand of sympathy to anyone who feels that they too have been tossed, without their permission, into a labyrinth.

There’s no question about the sheer enjoyability of this ­gigantic novel, both as an eerie thriller and as a moving love story.