Personally, I felt that the ending of the story was rather abrupt and anti-climatic. Just when it seemed that things were getting interesting, it felt like the characters ran away from everything. What do you guys think?

I agree about the ending, there was never any confrontation with Sakigake or the Little People. As always with Murakami, there are many answered questions, but there were a few here that I was a little unsatisfied with.
1. What's the deal with Tengo's mother and Aomame's friend both being murdered the same way? My reading was that his mother's lover killed her, and then the little people killed Aomame's friend in the same way for some reason.
2. What's with the married girlfriend being irretrievably lost? I guess the LP disposed of her.
3. When they talk about Akebono, they always mention how there was one dude who escaped capture at the end. I always assumed this was foreshadowing, but nothing ever seemed to come of it. Red Herring, or is someone actually an Akebono grad?
4. Exploded dog. LP i guess.
5. The air chrysalis of Aomame/Ushikawa.

Murakami works in mysterious ways.

I felt like the first book was a little slow, but the second one was great. Two of my favorite scenes was when Aomame meets/kills Leader and when Tengo goes to see his father for the first time.

1. What's the deal with Tengo's mother and Aomame's friend both being murdered the same way? My reading was that his mother's lover killed her, and then the little people killed Aomame's friend in the same way for some reason.

Interesting. I overlooked this. I wonder if it had some intended meaning.

2. What's with the married girlfriend being irretrievably lost? I guess the LP disposed of her.

I had guessed she was killed by the little people. I also wondered if the being her husband spoke of could have somehow been a dohta (sp?) of Kyoko, but that seemed less likely.

3. When they talk about Akebono, they always mention how there was one dude who escaped capture at the end. I always assumed this was foreshadowing, but nothing ever seemed to come of it. Red Herring, or is someone actually an Akebono grad?

Seemed never to come up to something meaningful, huh...

4. Exploded dog. LP i guess.

I assumed this was almost positively the case.

5. The air chrysalis of Aomame/Ushikawa.

I found it odd, too, that Ushikawa had moss on his tongue. It reminded me of the smaller moon.

In addition to this, I found it odd that it seemed to suggest that Tengo had drawn Aomame in to 1q84, or that it was a joint effort... What do you think of that? My impression was that Aomame initiated the world change for everyone, but Fuka-Eri, for example, only exists in 1q84.

As for who pulled whom into 1q84, that's a tough, perhaps impossible, question to answer I think. It did seem like Aomame took the first action by climbing down the stairs on the expressway, but there are other things to consider. For one, there's the fact that the world of 1q84 seems to conform to Tengo's novel, like the two moons being exactly how he described. Is tengo actually creating the world? There's the whole theme that runs through the book about re-writing history, and Tengo talks to Fuka-eri about how in 1984 it was some people's jobs just to rewrite history, which then became fact. Is that what Tengo is doing?

You know, at first I thought that Aomame initiated the change, amd that with this change came Fuka-Eri, her history, and that whole world. I felt Tengo simply described that world as it existed in 1q84...

That seemed consistent to me, but you bring up a good point that makes me change my mind a bit. Namely, Tengo described the moons, for example, in great detail - detail that was not present in Fuka-Eri's account. How could he have done this accurately if it were a prior reality? It stands to reason that Tengo and Fuka-Eri's joint effort created reality... But if this is the case, what was the reality of 1q84 prior to Tengo's writing? If Tengo created the reality of the two moons, what were the moons like prior to this when Fuka-Eri saw them?

Or, maybe Fuka-Eri's account, as a perceiver, was fiction until Tengo, the receiver, made it a reality. When Tengo made it a reality, perhaps the little people and their history began to exist, and "switched the tracks of reality"...

Another thing puzzles me, though. The little people lost interest in Fuka-Eri and Tengo upon Leader's death. Why would this be? This may provide insight toward the world of 1q84...