A typical Murakami protagonist, Tengo is an amiable loner, quietly disaffected from friends and society. Tengo is a math whiz and aspiring novelist. Now she is solitary and dangerous, her own kind of fanatic. Raised by Jehovah's Witnesses, she fled a severe, joyless childhood at 10. Her victims are men who have committed extreme violence against women and her method is a thin ice pick that, driven into the base of the neck, kills them dead without any evident trace of homicide. She is a fitness instructor, massage therapist and assassin. Two separate narratives unfold in that variant universe ofġQ84 Tokyo. Only when he is writing, admits a character, can he confirm that 'this person known as 'me' exists in the world.'

Notably, there is also a shaggy-dog element to the storytelling, and even some self-mockery of the reclusive Murakami's reputation for being both a long-distance runner and author, and a prolix one. For fans, the more is the merrier for newcomers, the book may be a few oddities, and a couple of hundred pages, beyond the patience threshold. With its animal allegories and echoes of folk legends, the references to everything fromĪlice in Wonderland to the Gnostic thinking of Carl Jung, the novel offers the most complete précis of its author's lifelong preoccupations and eccentricities. His taller-than-tall tales aren't to every taste, but those who fall for his variant worlds, so often nocturnal versions of our daytime realities, can't get enough of bottomless wells and talking animals, explosions of cruelty and sex, and mashes of East/West philosophy.ġQ84, it is maximalist Murakami. Two translators were put to quick work to render the sprawling text into the colloquial English that is the apparent match of his deceptively flat Japanese.Īt nearly double the length of any previous Murakami novel,ġQ84 promises an even deeper, more affecting immersion in the surreal universe that has made Murakami among the most widely read novelists on the planet. Norwegian Wood – the scale of the latest book was new. Sui generis Murakami, a cross of literary cult hero and Shinto priest, has been a sensation in his homeland since his breakout novel, 1987's

While the stir it caused wasn't unprecedented – the The novel was published in three volumes in Japan in 2009-2010. Replacing a 9 with a Q – a homonym pun in Japanese – is all it takes.Įxpectations for the 13th fiction in translation by the prodigious fabulist have been high.

As the title suggests, within a couple of chapters of Haruki Murakami's behemoth, we have shifted from one reality to another. Or it is at the start of the nearly 1,000 pages, and successive layers of strangeness and surprise, that unfold insideġQ84.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami