Switchblade Comb

Haruki Murakami‘s newest novel, 1Q84, was released in Japan yesterday to a massive frenzy, despite the marketing campaign of not revealing what it’s actually about. All that’s known is that he’s spent the last two years writing it, World War II is a theme, it’s 1000 pages long, written in third-person, split into two volumes, and may just be his ‘comprehensive novel.’

What Murakami has said -

“People have all sorts of concepts for the designation comprehensive novel, so it’s easy to be mistaken, but what I think of as a “comprehensive novel” is basically one that’s long . . . and heavy. And it’s a novel where all sorts of people, from remarkable people to normal people, appear one after the other, and many different perspectives are overlapped organically.”

HowToJapanese actually has a liveblog as they read, which I assume has minor spoilers. Unfortunately, a U.S. translation has yet to be confirmed, though I can’t imagine it will stay that way for long.