1Q84

Tokyo, 1984. Aomame, a young woman, takes a cryptic piece of advice from a taxi driver and soon starts to notice that the world around her does not quite add up. Small details are off, and she gradually understands that she has slipped into a different version of reality. She names it 1Q84, with the Q standing for a question mark, a world that poses a question. Elsewhere in the city, Tengo, who hopes to make his name as a novelist, agrees to a ghostwriting job that he has good reason to distrust. The longer he works on the manuscript, and the more he learns about the strange young author behind it, the more his quiet, orderly life begins to fall apart. Over the course of one year, the paths of these two people move steadily toward each other, and the hidden ties between them come into view. Around them gather a gifted teenage girl with a dyslexic's unusual way of seeing, a religious cult whose armed clash with the police made headlines, a wealthy and reclusive older woman who shelters abused women, an unusually ugly private investigator, a soft-spoken bodyguard of frightening efficiency, and a collector of television fees who simply will not go away. Part love story, part mystery, part fantasy, and part coming-of-age tale, with a darker vision of society that invites comparison with Orwell, 1Q84 is a sprawling and inventive novel from one of Japan's best-known contemporary writers.