The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in
Tokyo.
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. She agrees, but as a
result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the
real world. 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.
Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become
a writer. 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.
It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in
unusual ways. Can her story really be true?
Both Aomame and Tengo notice that the world has grown strange; both
realise that they are indispensable to each other. While their
stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times
intentionally, the two come closer and closer to intertwining.
"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" -- Richard Lloyd Parry The Times
Haruki Murakami, geb. 1949 in Kyoto, die Eltern sind Lehrer für japanische Literatur. Studium der Theaterwissenschaften und des Drehbuchschreibens in Tokyo, aufkeimendes Interesse an amerikanischer Literatur und Musik. 1974 Gründung des Jazzclubs 'Peter Cat', den er bis 1982 betreibt. 1978 erste erfolgreiche Buchveröffentlichung. In den 80er Jahren dauerhaft in Europa ansässig (u.a. in Frankreich, Italien und Griechenland), geht er 1991 in die USA, ehe er 1995 nach Japan zurückkehrt. 2006 erhielt Haruki Murakami den Franz-Kafka-Literaturpreis. 2009 wurde ihm der Jerusalem Prize für sein literarisches Werk verliehen.
