So when her driver tells her of a hidden emergency staircase that she can use to get back to the city below, she grabs the opportunity with both hands. She is on her way to an important engagement that she cannot miss. We meet Aomame as she sits in the back of a taxi that is stuck in stationary traffic on the Tokyo expressway. One departure from the familiar comes with the choice of a female protagonist. Along the way, alternative worlds, cats, and cult religion ensnare the characters, forcing them to reappraise themselves and the world around them. All the familiar Murakami tropes are there: Jazz, classical music, and 1960s rock provides the soundtrack to a novel essentially about disaffection, free will, love, and loneliness. The story is a familiar one: twenty-something drifters have their lives thrown into question by a series of unusual events over which they have little control.
It is a long book – some 600 pages in Book One and Book Two alone, a further 350 in Book Three. Is 1Q84 the Magnum Opus that sums up Murakami’s worldview? Or an experiment with narrative that badly backfires? Very possibly it is both at the same time. But away from all this Murakami-mania to which I and the entire media has whole-heartedly subscribed, the question of whether it is any good remains largely unanswered. Like the Harry Potter phenomenon, this hype has inspired people to have fun with books which is never a bad thing in my book. Expectation has built steadily over the past two years, pre-orders have gone through the roof, and bookshops even opened at midnight to satisfy the demand of Murakami’s dedicated fans. Rubin translated Book One and Book Two, published together here, Gabriel, Book Three which is published next week. In an effort to expedite publication, Murakami’s US publishers Knopf took the unusual step of commissioning his two regular translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, to simultaneously work on different parts of the book.
Ever since, English language readers have eagerly awaited its release. More than 1 million copies were sold in that first month alone. When 1Q84 was published in Japan in 2009, bookshops all but sold out within a day. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin 1Q84 (Book One and Book Two) by Haruki Murakami
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