1Q84

What It Is

A novel published in Japan in three volumes: Books One and Two in May 2009, Book Three in April 2010. Shinchosha released the first two with almost no description of what was inside, and Japan bought them by the million. It was a publishing event of a kind literary fiction rarely produces anywhere.

The title is a pun that only works in Japanese. The number nine is pronounced kyu, which is how a Japanese speaker says the letter Q. So 1Q84 is 1984 with a question mark inserted, and Orwell is not a coincidence; his novel is named inside the book.

The form is patient and almost hypnotic: alternating chapters, two point-of-view characters, third person, and all of Murakami's familiar furniture in place. Meals get cooked. Records get played. Someone irons a shirt. The pace is deliberate, the repetition is deliberate, and the accumulation is the method.

Why It Matters

This is Murakami's most serious attempt to make his private dream-logic carry the weight of a social novel. Belief and the organisations built on it, the machinery of media, and the particular loneliness of a very large city. In 1997 he published Underground, a book of interviews with survivors of the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, and something changed in him. 1Q84 is the novel in which that shift is most visible.

It is also the book that turned him from a widely translated novelist into a global event, with midnight queues outside bookshops in three countries.

And the argument about it is real. His admirers say this is the fullest world he ever built. His critics say the length magnifies everything he does badly: the circling repetition, the flatness of the male gaze whenever a woman's body is described, the way an unexplained image can stand in for a thought. Both are describing the same book accurately. Read it and you find out which reader you are.

Before You Read

Well over a thousand pages, and thirty to forty hours. The sentences are plain and the pages turn easily; the demand is stamina, not difficulty.

Do not make this your first Murakami. Start with Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World or Norwegian Wood, learn what he does and what he refuses to do, and come to this knowing the terms.

Read it in long sittings, a hundred pages at a time. The spell here is entirely a matter of rhythm, and a reader who takes ten pages a night will feel nothing but the length.

You do not need to have read Orwell first. It helps, and it is only a weekend.

Which Translation to Read

There is one English translation, so the choice is between editions of it. Jay Rubin translated Books One and Two; Philip Gabriel translated Book Three.

• Vintage International complete paperback, one volume, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel — recommended. The whole novel in a single object, which is how it should be met, and cheap enough to treat roughly. Rubin and Gabriel are the two finest Murakami translators alive, and the seam between them is audible if you listen for it: Rubin drier and more exact, Gabriel warmer. Most readers never notice. The cost: it is a brick, the spine will not survive the journey, and holding it up in bed is a workout. View on Amazon →
• Knopf hardcover, 2011, jacket designed by Chip Kidd. The best-made version and one of the most admired book designs of the century so far, with a translucent overlay that makes the whole thing shift as you turn it. The complete text. The cost: heavy, expensive, and too beautiful to take on a train.
• Harvill Secker and Vintage in Britain, split into separate volumes. Books One and Two together, Book Three apart, which follows the Japanese publication and is far kinder to your wrists. The cost: two purchases, and an interruption in a novel that lives on uninterrupted accumulation.

Take the one-volume Vintage. One thing worth knowing: Murakami's English publishers have cut him before, most famously trimming The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Nothing was cut here.

Getting the Most From This Book

Find Janacek's Sinfonietta and listen to it before you start. It is there on the first page and it keeps returning, and hearing it turns a piece of set dressing into something you can feel.

Stay off the internet while you are in it. This is one of the most discussed novels of the century, and almost every thread about it will hand you something you would rather have found yourself.

The commonest mistake is to treat it as a puzzle with a solution withheld. Murakami has never been a writer who ties things off, and a reader who reads for solutions will spend a thousand pages assembling a prosecution. Surrender to it instead and you will get far more out of it than the readers who audit it.