I take the Aunt camp's opinion further. 1Q84 is among the worst pieces of fiction I've read. The three books in the trilogy were my first reading of Murakami and remain the only books of his that I've read. I've looked around for opinions on his magnum opus and everyone seems to give different opinions. I bought Norwegian Wood and will sit down and read it eventually, but 1Q84 left a very bad taste in my mouth and I can't really encourage anyone to read it. I don't know how far elizabeth is, but Book 1 was better than the two sequels. My first concern was probably the flatness of the writing. This was particularly obvious in the internal monologues of Tengo and Aomame which were so detached that they distanced themselves from any form of psychology or characterisation and instead bordered on stripped point-of-view narrative on the plot. This turned out to be a major issue as the main plot focus was on the separation of Aomame and Tengo, who seemed passionless, rigid, robotic, etc. I might even be able to see the appeal of it as some kind of Tolstoyan statement on the meaningless of individuals in the march of history if Aomame and Tengo actually did something worth talking about in their time. Particularly in Book 3, and this is very meta-, the book just becomes a discussion of these two reading the newspaper, Proust, Dostovesky, Chekhov... When I finished the series, this ubiquitous intertextuality served as a grand list of authors I'd really rather have put time towards in lieu of Murakami.
I'm at the beginning of book 2 and I'm not too sure how I feel about it yet. I don t hate it but I don t really love it either. It's more like I don t care too much about the character and I feel the story really takes a bit too long to advance sometimes. (Maybe it's just that I haven t been reading much lately and i'm not really used to slow-paced books? I found The song of ice and fire advanced too slow for my liking too and I stopped reading after I finished the first book). For sure I'll have to read other Murakami books after that because 1Q84 seems not very representative of his work either way.
As I say, I preferred Book 1 to the other two. I think if you find the plot overwritten and the characters uninteresting, Book 2 will exacerbate that. Book 1 served as a decent exposition for a plot -- a foundation -- but as I said in my original post, the plot winds up assuming a very bland focus in the sequels. For me it was less an issue of a slow pace and more that it was completely meandering. It went from scene to scene and event to event but there was no implication that it had any real destination in mind. By Book 3 I was skipping entire passages of filler. Can't really comment on Murakami's other work and I too stopped ASOIAF after the first book. I've had that enormous series taunting me from my shelves for maybe two years now and it's still not over.