But Murakami's fans know that his focus has always been on the quiet strangeness of life, the hidden connections between perfect strangers, and the power of the non sequitur to reveal the associative strands that weave our modern world. The condensing of three volumes into a single tome makes for some careless repetition, and casual readers may feel that what actually occurs doesn't warrant such length. Even stranger is that two moons have appeared over Tokyo, the dawning of a parallel time line known as 1Q84 controlled by the all-powerful Little People. Fuka-Eri proves to be dangerously connected to the infamous Sakigake cult, whose agents are engaged in a bloody game of cat-and-mouse with Aomame. Meanwhile Tengo, an unpublished writer and mathematics instructor at a cram school, accepts an offer to write a novel called Air Chrysalis based on a competition entry written by an enigmatic 17-year-old named Fuka-Eri. Aomame is a beautiful assassin working exclusively for a wealthy dowager who targets abusive men. Nor should they be Murakami's trademark plainspoken oddness is on full display in this story of lapsed childhood friends Aomame and Tengo, now lonely adults in 1984 Tokyo, whose destinies may be curiously intertwined. The massive new novel from international sensation Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running) sold out in his native Japan, where it was released in three volumes, and is bound to provoke a similar reaction in America, where rabid fans are unlikely to be deterred by its near thousand-page bulk. 'It is a work of maddening brilliance and gripping originality, deceptively casual in style, but vibrating with wit, intellect and ambition' The Times While their stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times intentionally, the two come closer and closer to intertwining. Can her story really be true?īoth Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange both realise that they are indispensable to each other. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. Meanwhile, Tengo wishes to become a writer. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult.

She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo.

Read this imaginative masterpiece from the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood

1q84 book 1