Tengo, meanwhile, is tasked with re-writing a novel written by a teenage girl called Eriko Fukada. In her part of the story, she befriends a policewoman called Ayumi, who is later murdered, then works with an old lady called “the dowager” to assassinate the leader of a cult. We learn that Aomame is a hitwoman and that she specializes in killing abusive men. This world is very similar to hers but with several differences, the most obvious of which is that the Earth now has two moons.

After descending a flight of stairs, she starts to realize that she has crossed into an alternate dimension. The book begins with Aomame getting out of a taxi on the Shuto Expressway. In book three, a third protagonist is added in Ushikawa, a character who had appeared in Murakami's earlier novel, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Their stories draw closer together and eventually unite into a single narrative. One tells the story of a man called Tengo Kawana and the other follows a woman called Aomame. The first two books have a dual narrative (like several of Murakami's earlier novels). The events of 1Q84 take place in Tokyo during a fictionalized version of the year 1984, with the first volume set between April and June, the second between July and September, and the third between October and December. Literary Review nominated one excerpt from the book for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

While well received in Japan, 1Q84 was met with mixed reviews from international critics, who condemned the novel's excessive repetition, clichéd writing, clumsy styling and unyielding plot. The first chapter of 1Q84 had also been read as an excerpt in the Selected Shorts series at Symphony Space in New York. An excerpt from the novel appeared in the Septemissue of The New Yorker magazine as 'Town of Cats'. The English-language edition of all three volumes, with the first two volumes translated by Jay Rubin and the third by Philip Gabriel, was released in North America and the United Kingdom on October 25, 2011.

The novel's first printing sold out on the day it was released and sales reached a million within a month. She is quickly caught up in a plot involving Sakigake, a religious cult, and her childhood love, Tengo, and embarks on a journey to discover what is 'real'. The novel is a story of how a woman named Aomame begins to notice strange changes occurring in the world.

It covers a fictionalized year of 1984 in parallel with a 'real' one. United States edition of 1Q84, first published in the United States in 2011 by Knopf.ġQ84 ( いちきゅうはちよん, Ichi-Kyū-Hachi-Yon, stylized in the Japanese cover as 'ichi-kew-hachi-yon') is a novel written by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, first published in three volumes in Japan in 2009–10.

1q84 novel