Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul.
“A book that . . . makes you marvel, reading it, at all the strange
folds a single human brain can hold . . . A grand, third-person,
all encompassing meganovel. It is a book full of anger and violence
and disaster and weird sex and strange new realities, a book that
seems to want to hold all of Japan inside of it . . . Murakami has
established himself as the unofficial laureate of Japan—arguably
its chief imaginative ambassador, in any medium, to the world: the
primary source, for many millions of readers, of the texture and
shape of his native country . . . I was surprised to discover,
after so many surprising books, that he managed to surprise me
again.”
—Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine
“Profound . . . A multilayered narrative of loyalty and loss . . .
A fully articulated vision of a not-quite-nightmare world . . . A
big sprawling novel [that] achieves what is perhaps the primary
function of literature: to reimagine, to reframe, the world . .
. At the center of [1Q84’s] reality . . . is the question of
love, of how we find it and how we hold it, and the small fragile
connections that sustain us, even (or especially) despite the odds
. . . This is a major development in Murakami’s writing . . . A
vision, and an act of the imagination.”
—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“Murakami is clearly one of the most popular and admired novelists
in the world today, a brilliant practitioner of serious, yet
irresistibly engaging, literary fantasy . . . Once you start
reading 1Q84, you won’t want to do much else until you’ve finished
it . . . Murakami possesses many gifts, but chief among them is an
almost preternatural gift for suspenseful storytelling . . .
Despite its great length, [his] novel is tightly plotted, without
fat, and he knows how to make dialogue, even philosophical
dialogue, exciting . . . Murakami’s novels have been translated
into a score of languages, but it would be hard to imagine that any
of them could be better than the English versions by Jay Rubin,
partnered here with Philip Gabriel . . . There’s no question about
the sheer enjoyability of this gigantic novel, both as an eerie
thriller and as a moving love story . . . I read the book in three
days and have been thinking about it ever since.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“Fascinating . . . A remarkable book in which outwardly simple
sentences and situations snowball into a profound meditation on our
own very real dystopian trappings . . . One of those rare novels
that clearly depict who we are now and also offer tantalizing clues
as to where literature may be headed . . . I’d be curious to know
how Murakami’s yeoman translators Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel
divided up the work . . . because there are no noticeable bumps in
the pristine and deceptively simple prose . . . More than any
author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of
our real world, and he’s not afraid to incorporate elements of
surrealism or magical realism as tools to help us see ourselves for
who we really are. 1Q84 is a tremendous accomplishment. It does
every last blessed thing a masterpiece is supposed to—and a few
things we never even knew to expect.”
—Andrew Ervin, The San Francisco Chronicle
“[1Q84] is fundamentally different from its predecessors. We
realize before long that it is a road. And what the writer has laid
down is a yellow brick road. It passes over stretches of deadly
desert, to be sure, through strands of somniferous poppies, and
past creatures that hurl their heads, spattering us with spills of
kinked enigma. But the destination draws us: We crave it, and the
craving intensifies as we go along (unlike so many contemporary
novels that are sampler menus with neither main course nor appetite
to follow). More important, the travelers we encounter, odd and
wildly disparate as they are, possess a quality hard to find in
Murakami’s previous novels: a rounded, sometimes improbable
humanity with as much allure as mystery. It is not just puzzlement
they present, but puzzled tenderness; most of all in the two
leading figures, Aomame and Tengo. Converging through all manner of
subplot and peril, they arouse a desire in us that almost mirrors
their own . . . Murakami makes us want to follow them; we are
reluctant to relinquish them. Who would care about the yellow brick
road without Scarecrow’s, Woodman’s and Lion’s freakiness and
yearning? What is a road, particularly Murakami’s intricately
convoluted road, without its human wayfarers?”
—Richard Eder, The Boston Globe
“1Q84 is one of those books that disappear in your hands, pulling
you into its mysteries with such speed and skill that you don’t
even notice as the hours tick by and the mountain of pages quietly
shrinks . . . I finished 1Q84 one fall evening, and when I set it
down, baffled and in awe, I couldn’t help looking out the window to
see if just the usual moon hung there or if a second orb had
somehow joined it. It turned out that this magical novel did not
actually alter reality. Even so, its enigmatic glow makes the world
seem a little strange long after you turn the last page. Grade:
A.”
—Rob Brunner, Entertainment Weekly
“A 932-page Japanese novel set in Tokyo in which the words ‘sushi’
and ‘sake’ never appear but there are mentions of linguine and
French wine, as well as Proust, Faye Dunaway, The Golden Bough,
Duke Ellington, Macbeth, Churchill, Janáèek, Sonny and Cher, and,
give the teasing title, George Orwell? Welcome to the world of
Haruki Murakami . . . A symmetrical and multi-layered yarn, as near
to a 19th-century three-decker as it is possible to be . . . The
label of fantasy-realism has been stuck to it, but it actually has
more of a Dickensian or Trollopian structure . . . Explicit, yet
subtle and dream-like, combining viciousness with whimsy . . . this
is Murakami’s unflagging and masterful take on the desire and
pursuit of the Whole.”
—Paul Theroux, Vanity Fair
“Do you miss the girl with the dragon tattoo? Do you long for the
thrill of following her adventures again through three volumes of
exciting, intelligent fiction? If so, I have good news for you.
She’s got a sort of soul sister in one of the two main characters
in Haruki Murakami’s wonderful novel 1Q84 . . . With more than
enough narrative and intellectual heft to make it enjoyable for
anyone with a taste for moving representations of modern
consciousness in the magical realist mode, this story may easily
carry you away to a new world and keep you there for a long time .
. . The deep and resonant plot . . . unfolds at a leisurely pace
but in compelling fashion by luring us along with scenes of
homicidal intrigue, literary intrigue, religious fanaticism,
physical sex, metaphysical sex and asexual sex. And music . . .
Murakami’s main characters find themselves drawn toward each other
as irresistibly, magnetically, hypnotically, soulfully and
physically as any characters in Western fiction. Given the
plain-spoken but appealing nature of the prose (translated by Jay
Rubin and Philip Gabriel), most of you will feel that same power as
an insinuating compulsion to read on, despite the enormous length,
hoping against hope for a happy ending under a sky with either two
moons or one. Two moons—two worlds—a girl with—900 pages—1Q84 is a
gorgeous festival of words arranged for maximum comprehension and
delicious satisfaction.”
—Alan Cheuse, NPR
“Murakami’s new novel is the international literary giant at his
uncanny, mesmerizing best . . . The spell cast by Murakami’s
fiction is formed in the tension between his grounded accounts of
everyday life and the otherworldly forces that keep intruding on
that life, propelling the characters into surreal adventures . . .
Translation is at the center of what Murakami does; not a
translation from one tongue to another, but the translation of an
inner world into this, the outer one. Very few writers speak the
truths of that secret, inner universe more fluently.”
—Laura Miller, Salon
“Bewitching and extraordinarily unsettling . . . Part noir crime
drama, part love story, and part hallucinatory riff on 1984 . . .
Murakami paces a story as well as any writer alive. He knows how to
tell a love story without getting cute. He understands how to blend
realism and fantasy (magical realism if you want to get all
literary about it) in just the right proportions. And he has a
knack for writing about everyday matters—fixing dinner, going for a
walk—in such a way that the events at hand, no matter how mundane,
are never boring . . . Most impressive, he knows how to inject the
logic and atmosphere of dreams into his fiction without becoming
coy or vague. He’s Kafka-esque to the extent that he’s not
interested in why or how a man may have turned into an insect
overnight, but in how the man deals with his new situation. And
like Beckett, he furnishes his dreamscapes with a mere handful of
carefully chosen props—a tree, a streetlight, a playground sliding
board—specifics that ground a scene but leave room for the reader
to fill in details. This is perhaps the key point: he makes you,
the reader, his collaborator. What he leaves out is as important as
what he includes, because it encourages you to fill in the blanks
in the canvas . . . Murakami is one of the very few
novelists—Dickens comes most easily to mind—who can make a serious,
play-by-the-rules reader cheat and jump ahead to find out what’s
happened to a character . . . Even while we are being entertained
by the weirdness of the world he’s creating, we feel a gnawing
anxiety that this same book is unraveling our own sense of
normality. You don’t know where things are going while you read it,
and you can’t say exactly where you’ve been when you’re finished,
but everything around you looks different somehow. If this is
fiction as funhouse, it is very serious fun, and you enter at the
risk of your own complacency.”
—Malcolm Jones, Newsweek
“If you haven’t previously read Murakami . . . this is a good
introduction to his Lewis-Carroll-meets-Mister-Rogers style, a
distinctive blend of the wild and the ordinary that can be as
engaging as Wonderland itself. If you’ve read his previous book,
you’ll find a lot to enjoy here . . . 1Q84 has a big, romantic
heart and deserves to be celebrated on our shores.”
—Josh Emmons, People (3.5/4 stars)
“[1Q84] gets off to a vintage Murakami start: eerie wrinkles in an
otherwise ordinary Tokyo day. A woman stuck in traffic decides to
get out and walk. A struggling novelist is roped into a shady
writing project. But with every page, the ready edges closer to an
Orwellian rabbit hole. And when the plunge comes, it brings all the
trippy delights of Murakami’s unsettling imagination: a vanishing,
a parallel world with two moons, and ‘Little People’ who make Big
Brother look like an oaf.”
—Devin Gordon, GQ
“Voracious visionary Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 mixes
down-the-rabbit-hole fantasy with out-there science fiction for a
superhefty but accessible adventure.”
—Lisa Shea, Elle
“Powerful . . . In 1Q84, award-winning Japanese novelist Haruki
Murakami skips between alternate worlds, offering readers a moving
love story in what is perhaps his most ambitious novel yet . . . An
unstoppably readable, deeply moving love story that cements
Murakami’s reputation as a uniquely compassionate and imaginative
novelist who’s among the leading voices of his global generation .
. . Murakami likes to blur the boundaries of reality, and in this
sense 1Q84 is his most intricate work . . . Aomame and Tengo work
their way towards each other and out of the year 1Q84 like divers
straining for the surface. Finishing the book I felt as if I, too,
were coming to the surface; days later the world still does not
feel the way it used to.”
—Kevin Hartnett, The Christian Science Monitor
“1Q84 is extraordinarily ambitious . . . Beguiling and ridiculously
entertaining . . . Murakami has created the big, beautiful book so
many people have been waiting for. Before it even arrived in this
country, 1Q84 was one of the most chattered-about titles of the
fall. We got our hopes up—and he didn’t let us down.”
—Kevin Canfield, The Kansas City Star
“Murakami has created his genuine masterpiece, one that reaches out
to fans while also satisfying the critics who have called for a
more deft use of symbolism and literary worldliness in his work . .
. In this book, Murakami simplifies his familiar artistic
elements, leaving us with a readable pair of intertwined stories
that wind up on the same, enjoyable track. For readers willing to
enter Murakami’s literary marathon, the outcome will be one to
remember.”
—Jeremy C. Owens, San Jose Mercury News
“Lose yourself in the nearly 1,000 pages of Murakami’s alternately
mesmerizing and menacing world, living for large stretches of each
day with its characters, and time actually shifts and becomes
harder to measure—one of the many themes, as it happens, in this
big and brilliant book . . . It’s the quest for such shared
experience, between writer and reader in the dream world they
inhabit together, that explains why we read fiction—that magical
carpet whisking us from the lonely prison of the self into the
hearts and minds of others . . . It may not be easy traveling to
another world; it’s often hard enough getting around in our own.
But what is true for this novel’s determined protagonists will go
double for its faithful readers: Take the time to get carried away,
and time itself—as well as the way you think about how you spend
yours—will take on new dimensions. It’s a mind-blowing experience.
Great novels always are.”
—Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“[A] masterwork . . . [Murakami has] crafted what may well become a
classic literary rendering of pre-2011 Japan . . . Orwell wrote his
masterpiece to reflect a future dystopia through a Cold War lens .
. . Similarly, Murakami’s 1Q84 captures attitudes and circumstances
that characterize Japanese life before the March
earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster. Reading 1Q84, once can’t help
but sense already how things have changed.”
—Lee Makela, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Always intriguing . . . 1Q84 is a huge novel in every sense . . .
putting it down is not an option . . . The reader who steps into
its time flow only reluctantly comes ashore.”
—Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News
“1Q84 is a tremendous feat and a triumph . . . A must-read for
anyone who wants to come to terms with contemporary Japanese
culture.”
—Lindsay Howell, Baltimore Examiner
“Perhaps one of the most important works of science fiction of the
year . . . 1Q84 does not disappoint . . . [It] envelops the reader
in a shifting world of strange cults and peculiar characters that
is surreal and entrancing.”
—Matt Staggs, Suvudu.com
“There’s no denying that Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 . . . is an
impressive achievement, both for its already accomplished author
and for the two separate translators who took on the not
inconsequential task of translating the book from Murakami’s native
Japanese into English. Equally impressive is the author’s facility
at working in this long form—the story moves, it seems,
effortlessly through hundreds of pages, and the reader, too, glides
easily from page to page as if the book were a third of its length
. . . What’s most remarkable about Murakami’s novel, however, is
neither its prose style nor its accompanying emotional distance:
it’s its scope. Most so-called doorstopper novels contain
multitudes of characters, conflicts, decades, or even footnotes.
1Q84, at its heart, is primarily a story of two separated lovers.
It takes place in a short time frame and in a single city, but it’s
enriched by Murakami’s philosophical musings and his uniquely
visionary form of fantasy.”
—Norah Piehl, BookReporter.com
“Murakami’s dystopian magnum opus . . . 1Q84 unfolds as a
science-fiction thriller, and despite the pointed Orwellian
reference, it is closer in spirit to the work of Philip K. Dick.
Fantastic elements seamlessly integrate with the mundane to create
a world much like, if not quite like, our own . . . The supporting
cast . . . is lovingly lifted from classic pulp fiction archetypes,
and roots the novel in the noir mystery genre as well. Pulp
fiction, indeed, but on a grand scale—as ambitious, quirky and
imaginative as only Murakami can be.”
—Robert Weibezahl, BookPage
“Murakami’s trademark plainspoken oddness is on full display in
this story of lapsed childhood friends Aomame and Tengo, now lonely
adults in 1984 Tokyo, whose destinies may be curiously intertwined
. . . Murakami’s fans know that his focus has always been on the
quiet strangeness of life, the hidden connections between perfect
strangers, and the power of the non sequitur to reveal the
associative strands that weave our modern world. 1Q84 goes further
than any Murakami novel so far, and perhaps further than any novel
before it, toward exposing the delicacy of the membranes that
separate love from chance encounters, the kind from the wicked, and
reality from what people living in the pent-up modern world dream
about when they go to sleep under an alien moon.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Unquestionably Murakami’s most vividly imagined parallel world . .
. Gradually but inexorably, the tension builds, as we root
passionately for Tengo and Aomame to find one another and hold
hands again, so simple a human connection offering a kind of oasis
in the midst of the unexplainable and the terrifying. When Murakami
melds fantasy and realism, mystery and epic, it is no simple
genre-bending exercise; rather, it is literary alchemy of the
highest order.”
—Bill Ott, Booklist (starred review)
“Ambitious, sprawling and thoroughly stunning . . . Orwellian
dystopia, sci-fi, the modern world (terrorism, drugs, apathy, pop
novels)—all blend in this dreamlike, strange and wholly
unforgettable epic.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“At the core of this work is a spectacular love story about a girl
and a boy who briefly held hands when they were both ten. That
said, with the fiercely imaginative Murakami as author, the story’s
exposition is gloriously labyrinthine . . . Originally published in
Japan as three volumes, each of which were instant best sellers,
this work—perhaps Murakami’s finest—will surely have the same
success in its breathlessly anticipated all-in-one English
translation. Murakami aficionados will delight in recognizing
traces of earlier titles, especially A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian
Wood, and even Underground.”
—Terry Hong, Library Journal (starred review)
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