1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84 is a quiet, introspective, and character-driven thriller. It divulges its secrets delicately, and never completely, and the other world in which our heroine and hero find themselves never fits neatly into the tidy framework that American readers may expect from their dystopias. 

But when it comes down to it, why should a dystopia always answer the questions we readers ask of it?

This is by no means a novel for the reader who hopes to get to the answers, or the end, quickly. By turns lucid, strange, and downright disgusting, the world of 1Q84 is, in all the right ways, not unlike, and yet completely separate from, our own. Its main characters, Aomame, the unlikely assassin, and her childhood love, the long-lost writer Tengo, are beautifully realized from the novel's earliest pages, and even in their diurnal  meanderings, which, I warn you, are extensive, I found them fascinating.

As Aomame is forced to flee after a particularly high-profile assassination, she looks back at the apartment that had been her home:

Standing by the front door, she turned for one last look, aware that she would never be coming back. The thought made the apartment appear unbelievably shabby, like a prison that only locked from the inside, bereft of any picture or vase. The only thing left was the bargain-sale rubber plant on the balcony, which she had bought instead of a goldfish. She could hardly believe she had spent years of her life in this place without question or discontent.


"Good-bye," she murmured, bidding farewell not so much to the apartment as to the self that had lived here.

Rich in allusion and psychological depth, 1Q84 is a book to be lived in, explored, questioned, doubted, and believed it.

But, as is so often the case with self-knowledge, demand reasons or a rapid resolution, and you will be disappointed.