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 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.

Reviews

A New York Times Notable Book • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
 
“An irresistibly engaging literary fantasy.... Murakami possesses many gifts, but chief among them is an almost preternatural gift for suspenseful storytelling.”
—The Washington Post
 
“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.”
—The New York Times Magazine
 
“Part noir crime drama, part love story, and part hallucinatory riff on 1984.... 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.”
—Newsweek
 
“A magical journey to a parallel world ... 1Q84 is a love story and a detective story. It’s a philosophical novel about the power of storytelling, the nature of reality, and the shifting balance of good and evil."
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“A weirdly gripping page-turner."
—Charles Baxter, The New York Review of Books

“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. . . . A tremendous accomplishment.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle

“An immersive experience, one that will leave readers wondering what is real and what is imagined.”
—Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

“Murakami’s unflagging and masterful take on the desire and pursuit of the Whole.”
—Paul Theroux, Vanity Fair
 
“A big sprawling novel [that] achieves what is perhaps the primary function of literature: to reimagine, to reframe, the world.”
—Los Angeles Times

“The international literary giant at his uncanny, mesmerizing best.”
—Salon

 “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. . . . Magical. Grade: A.”
—Entertainment Weekly
 
“Voracious visionary Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 mixes down-the-rabbit-hole fantasy with out-there science fiction for a superhefty but accessible adventure.” —Elle

“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.”
—New York Daily News