1Q84

· Sold by Vintage
3.8
1.23K reviews
Ebook
944
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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.

Ratings and reviews

3.8
1.23K reviews
Paris Coté
January 3, 2014
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 :)
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Maurice Ferguson
June 1, 2021
While reading this book, I oscillated between finding the story profound and needlessly convoluted. Some parts went very slow, while others flowed and kept me in suspense. It could have been half the length and conveyed all the same plot points, metaphors, and imagery. A lot of the length was due to unnecessary repetition of information. It could have done without all the nonconsensual sex, initiated by characters who were otherwise presented as neutral or sympathetic, and which were not examined morally at all. The "little people" were completely irrelevant to the plot, and needed to be both better explained and better tied in to the events of the plot, or just left out altogether. The same can be said of the half-hearted suggestions of a god figure guiding the characters. There are also hints about a serial killer who just happens to kill 3 significant side characters (Tamaki, Ayumi, and Tengo's mother), but is never addressed directly, never explained or resolved in any way.
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A Google user
July 24, 2012
The book is written very well, but parts stick out as strange. Perhaps it is due to different cultural norms from Japan to America. Or maybe some parts didn't translate as easily (the book was written in Japanese). All-in-all, it was a good book, but I would recommend not reading it all in one stretch. The 1600 pages are broken up into three volumes, so it may be best to treat them all as separate parts of a trilogy. I read the final 200 pages today in an effort to finally be finished with this book, but also because the conclusion moves quickly from that point, and I found it hard to out the book down knowing I was so close to the end (comparatively speaking).
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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.

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