Two ideal lovers search for each other without even realizing it, in a world that is changing, in a fluid, indeterminate time.

But they are driven by the agony, the mania of the meeting.

Aomame and Tengo will traverse place and time, walk backwards in calendars and maps, wander and risk everything within Murakami's highly poetic and dangerous universe.

Secret brotherhoods, sects, vicious rulers, ruthless killers, avengers, black magical stories, passages, tunnels, cracks, a chrysalis in the clouds, psychedelia and tradition, haunted music, nostalgia, a glance at the moon - or the moons.

In the two moons of 1Q84, this City of Cats.

Murakami's much-discussed magnum opus constitutes an unprecedented narrative revelry, a festival of words, images, sensations, and when the spectacle ends, what remains is nothing but a simple - and therefore incredibly captivating - love story, a romantic fairy tale that is summed up in the disarming, passionate, liberating holding of hands.