1Q84
Haruki MurakamiThe 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 Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.
| status | Copy #1 (6103): in |
|---|---|
| genre | Literature and Fiction » General Literature |
| publisher | Vintage |
| publish date | 2011 |
| popularity | checked out 9 time(s) |
Given its place in the story this may seem like a lazy way to describe my experience of 1Q84 but at the moment I’m still sitting at the top of a playground slide and it’s a quiet night and my eyes are in the sky and as threads are gently plucked from the air I am wholeheartedly lost in wonder, magic, and love and for me this is the closest a book has ever come to being on par with the moon
This book captured me and put my life on hold until I could finish it. I fell asleep reading it, woke up next to it, rolled over, and read as long as I could before going on with my day (and thinking about the characters all day when I was away from the book). It’s full of satisfying synchronicities, and Murakami gets away with all sorts of weirdness by weaving an intricate sort of dream logic throughout the story. If you’re looking an engrossing world to fall into to distract you from your life, read 1Q84.