1Q84 (Vintage International)

Once an hour Ushikawa left his camera and did some stretching for five minutes. During that interval his surveillance was put on hold, but he knew from the start that total coverage by one person was impossible. It was more important to make sure his body didn’t get numb. His muscles would start to atrophy and then he wouldn’t be able to react quic

In the world that Fuka-Eri lived in, it seemed that facts were not conveyed directly. Like a map showing buried pirate treasure, things had to be connected through hints and riddles, ellipses and variations. He had grown used to it and, for the time being, provisionally, accepted whatever Fuka-Eri announced. When she said that they were being watch

He did not engage in pointless intellectual display, but it was clear that he had read an enormous amount and that his knowledge was both wide-ranging and deep. Nor was it simply a matter of factual knowledge: he had an intuitive eye both for people and for books. His biases played a large role here, but for Komatsu bias was an important element of

“Well, with facts what’s important is their weight and accuracy. Warmth is secondary.”

There’s a need, too, for a special name in order to distinguish between this present world and the former world in which the police carried old-fashioned revolvers. Even cats and dogs need names. A newly changed world must need one, too. 1Q84—that’s what I’ll call this new world, Aomame decided. Q is for “question mark.” A world that bears a questi

“Tengo wrote a story about the Little People and their deeds. Eriko furnished the basic story, and Tengo converted it into an effective piece of writing. It was their collaborative effort, and it acted as an antibody, countering the momentum of the Little People. It was published as a book and became a bestseller, as a result of which, if only temp

“Think of it this way, Tengo. Your readers have seen the sky with one moon in it any number of times, right? But I doubt they’ve seen a sky with two moons in it side by side. When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible.

On October 6, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by radical Islamic terrorists. Aomame recalled the event with renewed pity for Sadat. She had always been fond of Sadat’s bald head, and she felt only revulsion for any kind of religious fundamentalists. The very thought of such people’s intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of thei

“Armstrong’s trumpet and singing are absolutely wonderful, of course, but if you ask me, the thing you should concentrate on is Barney Bigard’s clarinet,” she would say. Yet the actual number of Bigard solos on the record was small, and they tended to be limited to a single chorus. Louis Armstrong was the star of this record. But she obviously love