catastrophe

an extract from my favourite review:
1Q84 is long (nearly 1,000 pages) and wildly imaginative, but at heart it’s a simple love story. Tengo and Aomame, both 30 years old, shared a singular, intense moment as children, disappeared from each other’s lives, and have been trying to recapture that kind of intimacy ever since. As 1Q84 opens they fall into an alternate world which is sinister and illogical, but which gives them the chance to find each other again.

Aomame calls this world 1Q84 (in which the “Q” stands for “question”) and it is most clearly distinguished by the fact that two moons hang in the sky — the familiar moon and, alongside it, a smaller moon, “slightly warped in shape, and green.” The moons preside over Aomame’s “sex feasts,” several murders, Tengo’s surreal trips to see his dying father, and one of the most transfixing nocturnal dream scenes I’ve ever read. The moons are a tangible reminder of the warning delivered to Aomame by her cab driver, just before she steps out of a taxi on a gridlocked Tokyo expressway and inadvertently into the world of 1Q84: “Please remember: things are not what they seem.”

one of my favourite quotes:
"he went home, went to bed, and dreamed. he hadn't had such a vivid dream in
a very long time. he was a tiny piece in a gigantic puzzle. but instead of having
one fixed shape, his shape kept changing. and so—of course—he couldn't fit
anywhere. as he tried to sort out where he belonged, he was also given a set
amount of time to gather the scattered pages of the timpani section of a score.
a strong wind swept the pages in all directions. he went around picking up
one page at a time. he had to check the page numbers and arrange them in
order as his body changed shape like an amoeba. the situation was out of con-
trol. eventually Fuka-Eri came along and grabbed his left hand. Tengo's shape
stopped changing. the wind suddenly died and stopped scattering the pages of
the score. "what a relief!" Tengo thought, but in that instant his time began to
run out. "this is the end," Fuka-Eri informed him in a whisper. one sentence,
as always. time stopped, and the world ended. the earth ground slowly to a
halt, and all sound and light vanished.

when he woke up the next day, the world was still there, and things were
already moving forward, like the great karmic wheel of Indian mythology that
kills every living thing in its path."