A mesmerising, epic, utterly involving masterpiece from Haruki Murakami
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown
Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him
suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the
Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following
year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled
Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood,
published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a
phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many
languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to
Murakami's unique and addictive fictional universe.
Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a
day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance
running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and
races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records
and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I
Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and
they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing
quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of
imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,
1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious
and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant
readers, ensuring Murakami's place as one of the world's most
acclaimed and well-loved writers.
Murakami's magnum opus
*Japan Times*
1Q84 has a range and sophistication that surpasses anything else in
his oeuvre. It is his most achieved novel; an epic in which form
and content are neatly aligned... So like Murakami himself, I'll
borrow from Orwell: 1Q84 is quite simply doubleplusgood
*Independent on Sunday*
1Q84 reads like a cross between Stieg Larsson and Roberto Bolano...
In its bones, this novel is a thriller
*Daily Telegraph*
Eerie, suspenseful and packed full of gorgeous ordinary details and
provocative extraordinary events, Murakami takes weighty themes and
delivers a compulsive tale that is funny, fresh and intensely
surreal. Unmissable.
*Marie Claire*
It is a work of maddening brilliance and gripping originality,
deceptively casual in style, but vibrating with wit, intellect and
ambition
*The Times*
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