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1Q84 cover art

1Q84

Written by: Haruki Murakami,Jay Rubin - translator,Philip Gabriel - translator
Narrated by: Allison Hiroto,Marc Vietor,Mark Boyett
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Publisher's Summary

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 - "Q" is for "question mark". A world that bears a question.

Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame's and Tengo's narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell's, 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami's most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

BONUS AUDIO: Audible interviews the translators of 1Q84, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel.

©2011 Haruki Murakami (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

What the critics say

"Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers.... But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves." ( The New York Times Book Review)
“Profound . . . A multilayered narrative of loyalty and loss . . . A fully articulated vision of a not-quite-nightmare world . . . A big sprawling novel [that] achieves what is perhaps the primary function of literature: to reimagine, to reframe, the world . . . At the center of [ 1Q84’s] reality . . . is the question of love, of how we find it and how we hold it, and the small fragile connections that sustain us, even (or especially) despite the odds . . . This is a major development in Murakami’s writing . . . A vision, and an act of the imagination.” (David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times)
1Q84 is one of those books that disappear in your hands, pulling you into its mysteries with such speed and skill that you don’t even notice as the hours tick by and the mountain of pages quietly shrinks . . . I finished 1Q84 one fall evening, and when I set it down, baffled and in awe, I couldn’t help looking out the window to see if just the usual moon hung there or if a second orb had somehow joined it. It turned out that this magical novel did not actually alter reality. Even so, its enigmatic glow makes the world seem a little strange long after you turn the last page. Grade: A.” (Rob Brunner, Entertainment Weekly)

What listeners say about 1Q84

Average Customer Ratings
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  • 4 out of 5 stars
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Story
  • 4 out of 5 stars
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    167
  • 4 Stars
    79
  • 3 Stars
    40
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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Soft porn pretentiousness

Wow, couldn't get beyond the first few chapters. After wading through tedious descriptions of nothing much, I hoped that the story was building to something worth the anticipation, but found instead, to my great disappointment, that it was just leading to the author's creepy sexual fantasies and obsessions. After listening to get another description of breasts and older men lusting after teenage girls, I'd had quite enough. Our female protagonist suddenly asks a much older man if he has a large cock and wants to see it. For goodness sake, if this isn't the self-indulgent fantasy of an aging male author, I don't know what is! I was expecting something more cerebral than this garbage.

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30 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Bechdel Test Fail

If you're looking for well written female characters, look elsewhere because this is both dated and disconcerting.

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Questionable perspective

I gave it about 1/4 of the book before I stopped. Female characters who are consistently overly preoccupied with their breasts, sexualization of under age girls, much talk of incest, child abuse and rape, and grossly inappropriate body shaming of disabled folk. And the story really isn’t that compelling. Not enough to continue through the authors world view.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Weird and Wonderful

I couldn't begin to describe this book to someone, but the sheer completeness of this story is beautiful. At times it is thrilling, at times it is boring yet still it keeps me glued to my headphones, at time intriguing and weird, it feels like going down the rabbit hole and you can't put it down because you need to see where it leads.

Not only the story, but the narration is a treasure, the narrators have naturally calming tones that bring a sense of peace to my daily commutes.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Terrible.

The characters are uncompelling. The story is boring, slow, and dry. The writing (maybe translation?) is overly descriptive and repetitive. The number of descriptions of women’s breasts goes beyond obscene to flat out sexism as though women think of nothing else in their time. The narrators are flat and manage to make the bad story worse, particularly because the audio goes from being audible to inaudible within the same chapter based on the narrators’ volume. Avoid.

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

My new gold standard for audio book performance.

I had read some other reviews prior to listening the 1Q84 and all I can say is, grossly under-rated! Outstanding story with best in class narration all around. I loved this audio book!

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Lovely story

Simply amazing, I throughly enjoyed every moment.
I hope to listen to more works by Murakami

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

I read "War and Peace", so...

This book is long. Exceedingly long. But not painfully so.There are only a couple of plot threads that seem unnecessary, and the flow between the two main storylines is great. At the perfect moment, it switches to the other story. Performances by the readers in these separate plotlines is very good.

A couple of people have mentioned they were turned off by some of the sexuality. To them I say "Come on, people. This is Japan, the birthplace of Hentai"! Pretty tame actually.
I've read this book described as "weird" and it is. Murakami almost seems to be following a "free association" method. Did he plan out the next part of the story, or just go with it, making it up as he went along?
BIT OF A SPOILER BELOW:











In the end he ties most of the loose ends, but it's a Deus Ex Machina resolution. They just leave. A little unsatisfying given the quality of the character development and the feeling of "What is going on here?"

Despite a couple of small issues, I really liked it. 8.5 out of 10 stars

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Don't trust the negative reviews

So funny the negative reviews I read are people that didn't read the whole book.

This book has been a good friend, when dealing with a strange world. The funny thing is my world came full circle in a good way when I finished this book. I feel connected to the collective subconscious reading it somehow.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Why does anyone like this book?

Lots of repeating pointless details. Author seems to think sexualizing everything makes for good writing. Lots of loose ends that are never tied up. A lot of characters and sections of the book did not need to be there

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2 people found this helpful