1Q84
Haruki Murakami, 2009
Fantasy Science fictionContemporary fictionMystery, thriller & crime
A Tokyo woman with a hidden trade, a maths teacher and a cult's story converge under two moons in a parallel 1984.
Feels like unease and wonder. About freedom, society and memory.
A page from the book
What it feels like to sit under two moons until the cold erases time.
Tengo gazed at the moons, not paying much attention to the sound of the wind, sitting there until his whole body was chilled to the bone. It must have been around fifteen minutes. No, maybe more. His sense of time had left him. His body, initially warmed by the whiskey, now felt hard and cold, like a lonely boulder at the bottom of the sea.The clouds continued to scud off toward the south. No matter how many were blown away, others appeared to take their place. There was an inexhaustible source of clouds in some land far to the north. Decisive people, minds fixed on the task, clothed in thick, gray uniforms, working silently from morning to night to make clouds, like bees make honey, spiders make webs, and war makes widows. Haruki Murakami.The Q in the title stands for 'question': Murakami wanted the year to sound like an unanswered question, and the Japanese pronunciation is 'ichi-kyū-hachi-yon.'
Books that feel like this
More by Haruki Murakami
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami, 1987
A Tokyo student is pulled between a fragile girl from his past and a loud, alive girl in his present. Memory, desire, and grief, set to Beatles songs.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami, 1994
An unemployed Tokyo househusband answers a stranger's phone call and finds his ordinary life starting to come apart.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- What is 1Q84 like?
- Feels like unease and wonder. About freedom, society and memory.
- What should I read after 1Q84?
- If you liked 1Q84, try Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood), Prodigy (Marie Lu) and The Stranger (Albert Camus).
A taste of the feed
The moment a man decides he has nothing left to confess.
I don’t know why, but something inside me snapped. I started yelling at the top of my lungs, and I insulted him and told him not to waste his prayers on me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I was pouring out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger and cries of joy.
The Stranger · Albert Camus
The most dangerous people are not the ones who look like monsters.
“He’s a fair man.” I looked at him, startled. “I said fair,” he repeated. “Not likable.” I kept quiet. His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.
Kindred · Octavia E. Butler
What if oblivion were not an ending but a scattering into the world.
Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.
The Amber Spyglass · Philip Pullman
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