1Q84

Haruki Murakami

Oct 2011 · Sold by Vintage

About this eBook

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A tremendous accomplishment. It does every last blessed thing a masterpiece is supposed to—and a few things we never even knew to expect.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Brilliant . . . an irresistibly engaging literary fantasy.”—The Washington Post

A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is a striking feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

Ratings and reviews

This was my first Murakami .I didn't feel as though he needed all the metaphysical plots which were left hanging part of the time.A good editor might not be a match for Murakami, but some of the length could have been left off. I basically would have enjoyed the book with no "little people." I have to wonder what work of his I should choose next?

Exciting and weird. I quickly read this first M book and found the imagery in line with many Japanese anime I've seen, the storytelling often as tangential and interesting. Four only for the personal desire to tighten up some sections... But then, I'm not authoring anything but a critic, so who am I to say :)

The story is great. The book is boring. It could be a quarter of the size and not lose any detail and be enjoyable. Every time the author presents a metaphor, for example, whether insightful or obvious, he spends pages telling you that it was a metaphor and what a great metaphor it was because of all of the specific ways it relates to the character's situation and then repeats that 3 or 4 more times. I really wanted an, "I get it, skip back to the story" button.

About the author

HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and one of the most recent of his many international honors is the Cino Del Duca World Prize, whose previous recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Ismail Kadare, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Joyce Carol Oates.