To inflict clandestine punishment on the brutish men, the Dowager retains the services of the novel's other main character: a woman named Aomame, a martial-arts instructor and physical therapist.Įchoes, here, of the themes of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, but what doesn't often happen in Swedish noir is that groups of terrifying leprechauns emerge from the mouths of goats and people, or that characters look up and see a second moon, misshapen and moss-coloured, hanging in the sky. (Murakami's translators Rubin and Gabriel, assigned a volume each to meet a rush publishing schedule, have also conspired successfully in producing an English version of limpid consistency.) Elsewhere in Tokyo, an elderly woman known only as the Dowager runs a shelter for female victims of domestic violence. One of the two main characters is a maths teacher and writer, Tengo, who gets drawn by his editor into a literary conspiracy: he ghost-rewrites a novel by a teenage girl, which then wins a prize and becomes a bestseller.

He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.Īs 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.Ī 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.īONUS AUDIO: Audible interviews the translators of 1Q84, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel.Other groupings in the novel can also seem cult-like in structure. Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 - 'Q' is for 'question mark'. Earphones Award Winner ( AudioFile Magazine)Ī young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her.

Murakami 1q84