After the quake blind willow, sleeping woman dance dance dance

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR 
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has 
been translated into more than forty languages, and the most recent of his many 
international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. 
Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul. 

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READER’S GUIDE 
1Q84 
by Haruki Murakami 
The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested further reading that follow are 
designed to enhance your group’s discussion of 
1Q84
, the magnum opus of critically 
acclaimed and best-selling novelist, Haruki Murakami, author of 
The Wind-Up Bird 
Chronicle
, 
Norwegian Wood
, and 
Kafka On the Shore.

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Introduction 
Set in 1984, Haruki Murakami’s expansive new novel tells the story of the deeply 
intertwined fates of its two remarkable protagonists, Tengo and Aomame. 
Tengo and Aomame were grade school classmates who experienced a moment of 
mystical union when Aomame, a girl shunned for belonging to a fringe religious 
group, suddenly seized Tengo’s hand and looked deeply into his eyes. Their paths 
diverged shortly after Aomame’s impulsive and ambiguous gesture, but each was left 
profoundly changed by it. For the next 20 years, they are held in the gravitational pull 
of this brief moment of connection. 
Now they are nearly thirty. Tengo is a math teacher and unpublished novelist, 
drifting rather aimlessly through his life, with no clear sense of purpose or ambition. 
Aomame is a fitness instructor, bodyworker and, most importantly, an assassin of men 
who have violently abused their wives. 
When Komatsu, an unscrupulous and cynical editor, asks Tengo to rewrite a story 
by 17-year-old Fuka-Eri so that it can be considered for a major literary prize, Tengo 
realizes he’s entering into a devil’s bargain. But he’s so taken with the story that he is 
unable to resist Komatsu’s offer. Accepting the task opens up a Pandora’s box of 
perils that far surpass even Tengo’s and Komatsu’s worst fears. The novel, 
Air 
Chrysalis
, becomes an immediate best seller, attracting widespread media attention 
that threatens to uncover Komatsu’s and Tengo’s scam. More ominously, the novel 
has aroused the ire of the “little people,” a malevolent group of other-worldly 
miniature spirits. 
Aomame meanwhile has her own secrets. Employed by an elderly dowager, she 
stealthily and expertly murders men who have abused their wives but remain 
unprosecuted. When she accepts the assignment to kill the heavily protected leader of 
Sakigake, the very religious cult that Fuka-Eri had fled and written about in 
Air 
Chrysalis
, she too enters a world of danger she never could have imagined. She has 
literally entered another world, one that is nearly identical to the ordinary world of 
1984 except that it has two moons in the sky. And in this new world, the flow of 
time—and rules of reality—have been subtly altered. 
Blurring the line between possible and impossible, linear and non-linear time, 
fiction and reality, fate and free will, 
1Q84
is both a metaphysical mind-teaser and a 
fast-paced thriller where the stakes for Tengo and Aomame couldn’t be any higher. 
Murakami’s most ambitious novel to date, 
1Q84
is also an extraordinary love story, a 
story about the power of a single moment of deep connection to transcend time and 
space—and justify even the greatest of risks. 

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