Reviews
A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Best Book of the Year "An irresistibly engaging literary fantasy.... Murakami possesses many gifts, but chief among them is an almost preternatural gift for suspenseful storytelling." -- The Washington Post "A grand, third-person, all encompassing meganovel. It is a book full of anger and violence and disaster and weird sex and strange new realities, a book that seems to want to hold all of Japan inside of it." -- The New York Times Magazine "Part noir crime drama, part love story, and part hallucinatory riff on 1984. ... You don't know where things are going while you read it, and you can't say exactly where you've been when you're finished, but everything around you looks different somehow." -- Newsweek "A magical journey to a parallel world ... 1Q84 is a love story and a detective story. It's a philosophical novel about the power of storytelling, the nature of reality, and the shifting balance of good and evil." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer "A weirdly gripping page-turner." --Charles Baxter, The New York Review of Books "More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world, and he's not afraid to incorporate elements of surrealism or magical realism as tools to help us see ourselves for who we really are. . . . A tremendous accomplishment." -- The San Francisco Chronicle "An immersive experience, one that will leave readers wondering what is real and what is imagined." -- Pittsburgh Tribune-Review "Murakami's unflagging and masterful take on the desire and pursuit of the Whole." --Paul Theroux, Vanity Fair "A big sprawling novel [that] achieves what is perhaps the primary function of literature: to reimagine, to reframe, the world." -- Los Angeles Times "The international literary giant at his uncanny, mesmerizing best." -- Salon " 1Q84 is one of those books that disappear in your hands, pulling you into its mysteries with such speed and skill that you don't even notice as the hours tick by. . . . Magical. Grade: A." -- Entertainment Weekly "Voracious visionary Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 mixes down-the-rabbit-hole fantasy with out-there science fiction for a superhefty but accessible adventure." -- Elle "A huge novel in every sense . . . putting it down is not an option. . . . The reader who steps into its time flow only reluctantly comes ashore." -- New York Daily News, "A book that . . . makes you marvel, reading it, at all the strange folds a single human brain can hold . . . A grand, third-person, all encompassing meganovel. It is a book full of anger and violence and disaster and weird sex and strange new realities, a book that seems to want to hold all of Japan inside of it . . . Murakami has established himself as the unofficial laureate of Japan-arguably its chief imaginative ambassador, in any medium, to the world: the primary source, for many millions of readers, of the texture and shape of his native country . . . I was surprised to discover, after so many surprising books, that he managed to surprise me again." -Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine "Profound . . . A multilayered narrative of loyalty and loss . . . A fully articulated vision of a not-quite-nightmare world . . . A big sprawling novel [that] achieves what is perhaps the primary function of literature: to reimagine, to reframe, the world . . . At the center of [ 1Q84 's] reality . . . is the question of love, of how we find it and how we hold it, and the small fragile connections that sustain us, even (or especially) despite the odds . . . This is a major development in Murakami's writing . . . A vision, and an act of the imagination." -David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times "Murakami is clearly one of the most popular and admired novelists in the world today, a brilliant practitioner of serious, yet irresistibly engaging, literary fantasy . . . Once you start reading 1Q84 , you won't want to do much else until you've finished it . . . Murakami possesses many gifts, but chief among them is an almost preternatural gift for suspenseful storytelling . . . Despite its great length, [his] novel is tightly plotted, without fat, and he knows how to make dialogue, even philosophical dialogue, exciting . . . Murakami's novels have been translated into a score of languages, but it would be hard to imagine that any of them could be better than the English versions by Jay Rubin, partnered here with Philip Gabriel . . . There's no question about the sheer enjoyability of this gigantic novel, both as an eerie thriller and as a moving love story . . . I read the book in three days and have been thinking about it ever since." -Michael Dirda, The Washington Post "Fascinating . . . A remarkable book in which outwardly simple sentences and situations snowball into a profound meditation on our own very real dystopian trappings . . . One of those rare novels that clearly depict who we are now and also offer tantalizing clues as to where literature may be headed . . . I'd be curious to know how Murakami's yeoman translators Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel divided up the work . . . because there are no noticeable bumps in the pristine and deceptively simple prose . . . More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world, and he's not afraid to incorporate elements of surrealism or magical realism as tools to help us see ourselves for who we really are. 1Q84 is a tremendous accomplishment. It does every last blessed thing a masterpiece is supposed to-and a few things we never even knew to expect." -Andrew Ervin, The San Francisco Chronicle "[ 1Q84 ] is fundamentally different from its predecessors. We realize before long that it is a road. And what the writer has laid down is a yellow brick road. It passes over stretches of deadly desert, to be sure, through strands of somniferous poppies, and past creatures that hurl their heads, spattering us with spills of kinked enigma. But the destination draws us: We crave it, and the craving intensifies as we go along (unlike so many contemporary novels that are sampler menus with neither main course nor appetite to follow). More important, the travelers we encounter, odd and wildly disparate as they are, possess a quality hard to find in Murakami's previous novels: a rounded, sometimes improbable humanity with as much allure as mystery., A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Best Book of the Year "Brilliant. . . . An irresistibly engaging literary fantasy. . . . Murakami possesses many gifts, but chief among them is an almost preternatural gift for suspenseful storytelling." - The Washington Post "A grand, third-person, all encompassing meganovel. It is a book full of anger and violence and disaster and weird sex and strange new realities, a book that seems to want to hold all of Japan inside of it." - The New York Times Magazine "Bewitching. . . . Part noir crime drama, part love story, and part hallucinatory riff on 1984 . . . . You don't know where things are going while you read it, and you can't say exactly where you've been when you're finished, but everything around you looks different somehow. If this is fiction as funhouse, it is very serious fun, and you enter at the risk of your own complacency." - Newsweek "A magical journey to a parallel world . . . 1Q84 is a love story and a detective story. It's a philosophical novel about the power of storytelling, the nature of reality, and the shifting balance of good and evil. . . . Once the narrative begins to pick up, you have no desire to put the book down." - The Philadelphia Inquirer "A weirdly gripping page-turner. . . . Its tonal register-as if serving as an antidote to the unsettling world it presents-is consistently warmhearted, secretly romantic, and really quite genial." -Charles Baxter, The New York Review of Books "Fascinating. . . . More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world, and he's not afraid to incorporate elements of surrealism or magical realism as tools to help us see ourselves for who we really are. . . . A tremendous accomplishment. It does every last blessed thing a masterpiece is supposed to-and a few things we never even knew to expect." - The San Francisco Chronicle "Magnificent in many ways, a work of the imagination that defies description. . . . An immersive experience, one that will leave readers wondering what is real and what is imagined." - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review "[A] Japanese novel set in Tokyo in which the words 'sushi' and 'sake' never appear but there are mentions of linguine and French wine, as well as Proust, Faye Dunaway, The Golden Bough , Duke Ellington, Macbeth, Churchill, Janáèek, Sonny and Cher, and, given the teasing title, George Orwell? . . . This is Murakami's unflagging and masterful take on the desire and pursuit of the Whole." -Paul Theroux, Vanity Fair "Profound. . . . A multilayered narrative of loyalty and loss. . . . A big sprawling novel [that] achieves what is perhaps the primary function of literature: to reimagine, to reframe, the world. . . . A vision, and an act of the imagination." - Los Angeles Times "The international literary giant at his uncanny, mesmerizing best. . . . Translation is at the center of what Murakami does; not a translation from one tongue to another, but the translation of an inner world into this, the outer one. Very few writers speak the truths of that secret, inner universe more fluently." - Salon " 1Q84 is one of those books that disappear in your hands, pulling you into its mysteries with such speed and skill that you don't even notice as the hours tick by. . . . Magical. . . . Its enigmatic glow makes the world seem a little strange long after you turn the last page. Grade: A." - Entertainment Weekly "Two moons-two worlds-a girl with-900 pages- 1Q84 is a gorgeous festival of words arranged for maximum comprehension and delicious satisfaction." -Alan Cheuse, NPR "[ 1Q84 ] is fundamentally different from its predecessors. . . . What the writer has laid down is a yellow brick road. It passes over stretches of deadly desert, to be sure, through strands of somniferous poppies, and past creatures that hurl their heads, spattering us with spills of kinked enigma. But the destination draws us: We crave it, and the craving intensifies as we go along.
