1Q84 (Vintage International) [Paperback]
Book Description
Release
Date: January 22, 2013
“Murakami is like a magician who explains what he’s doing as he performs
the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while
anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this
one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves.” —The New York
Times Book Review
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 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.