1Q84 - Book 1

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 17-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.

'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.' -- The Times

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1949. He grew up in Kobe and then moved to Tokyo, where he attended Waseda University. After college, Murakami opened a small jazz bar, which he and his wife ran for seven years.His first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won the Gunzou Literature Prize for budding writers in 1979. He followed this success with two sequels, Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase, which all together form 'The Trilogy of the Rat'.Murakami is also the author of the novels Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Norwegian Wood, Dance Dance Dance, South of the Border, West of the Sun, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Sputnik Sweetheart, Kafka on the Shore, After Dark, 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. He has written three short story collections – The Elephant Vanishes, After the Quake and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and an illustrated novella, The Strange Library.Additionally, Murakami has written several works of nonfiction. After the Hanshin earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack in 1995, he interviewed surviving victims, as well as members of the religious cult responsible. From these interviews, he published two nonfiction books in Japan, which were selectively combined to form Underground. He also wrote a series of personal essays on running, entitled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.The most recent of his many international literary honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul. Murakami’s work has been translated into more than 50 languages. Marc Vietor is an actor, born in La Jolla, California and now living in New York. He is a graduate of the Drama Division of the Juilliard School and Yale College. Marc has worked as an Associate Director of Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre on Broadway, variously assisting on four productions. On Broadway he also worked as an adaptor, musical supervisor and producers. Alison Hiroto is a trained singer, actor and dancer. She has toured nationally as Pocahontas in Pocahontas and as Sadako in Sadako and 1,000 Cranes. Internationally, she has performed at the Venice Biennale as well as in London, Rome, Spoleto, Bogota, Taipei, Zagreb and Tirana. She is a member of the Great Jones Repertory Company, Loco 7 Dance Puppet Theatre and NYU's First Look Theatre Company. Mark Boyett is primarily a stage actor. His New York credits include creating the roles of Frank Slate in Clean Alternatives and Rusty in A Play On Words. Regional credits include The Cherry Orchard, The Retreat From Moscow, Wit, The Mystery of Irma Vep, A Dybbuk, and Henry IV Parts I & II.He is also co-creator of The Diner’s Deck.

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