Starting position: 1Q84

A trilogy? How blasè, we moan, hand to forehead like Scarlet O'Hara. (We're a dramatic bunch, us readers. After all, we choose to experience more lives, more stories. For fun.) These 'trilogies' are false promises: the episodes breed until, five books later, you're waiting for your favourite character to... die from old age. (My favourite died in Book 3. He wasn't old. There are a lot of pages to wade through after heartbreak like that.) Anyway, this trilogy is the Rhett Butler to your Scarlet O'Hara.

You know what book it is - the title is in the title of the post. So I can meander. Haruki Murakami's novels are not easy reads, in any sense. It's like James Joyce: You either think he's a genius or a hack. (Guess which side I am on. In both cases.) And that has a lot to do with the book you start with.

I started with Kafka on the Shore and didn't know what to think until the novel was almost finished. The author tells multiple stories at the same time and, although I enjoyed each story, I couldn't figure out where this was going. Then, like those clowns who twist and knot balloons into shapes (I hate balloons, incidentally), he tied everything up into a neat... poodle.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was not as pleasant. I disliked it for the same reason I liked Kafka. The stories are sequential, not parallel. And like everything Murakami writes, the characters are symbolic. So you're carrying your interpretation through the different stories, and it's supposed to be 'maturing' as the novel develops, but the clues keep mutating. Your poodle is suddenly a sausage dog and then it's not even a dog - it's a giraffe!

Both novels are intentionally cryptic, I think to make you aware of the process of interpreting what you read and to give you the freedom to essentially create your own novel with the author. All very post-modern hurrah. In Kafka, Murakami beckoned me on to a shaded verandah to create our balloon animals. In Wind-up Bird, he herded me into a kids' party and went to run some errands.

With a win-lose ratio of 50:50, you might doubt my objectivity here. Surely I need another round before proclaiming his novels Monarchs of their own Bookshelf? Consider that, after Kafka, I could not read anything for weeks. The first books I read after both of Murakami's novels were Neil Gaiman's. After Murakami's plot contortions, Gaiman's novels seemed staid. I'm sorry! I can hear you O'Hara-ing again! My point is only (settle down, please) that I was almost literally transfixed by each book, regardless of my review of it.

So here we go: 1Q84. Released in three instalments in Japanese only, it was translated and released in English a year or so ago. (The delay between the Japanese and English editions amounts to the same anticipation at the delay between installments. Clever.) Now, I have my eye on a copy and that copy is mine - all 1318 pages, bound in a black cover, with a spine that will crack beneath the weight of the words and their symbolism...

But you don't eat a biscuit at once. No. You twist the pieces until you can get to the centre: creamy, chocolatey, jammy, whatever. You eat the centre first and then the biscuit pieces. That is The Only Way. Cease and desist. Put away that balloon.

So first, I will place the book on a central surface (my kitchen counter). Second, I will manhandle it for a few days: ruffle the pages to feel their weight, open the book up to examine the typeface, examine the cover (front, spine and back), read the introduction, read the blurb and (this is the real test of an editor - I'll save the story for another time) smell the pages. Only then will I begin to read, armed with a bookmark and settled in a warm spot.

Trilogies might be tired, but we still buy the books and read them - Robert Jordan would be a lot quicker to write if he needed the money to pay off a car. Trilogies are epic. Unlike other trilogies, though, Murakami is going to abandon me standing on a stage with a handful of limp balloons and a clown costume. Guaranteed. This isn't The Lord of the Rings.