2011 - Knopf
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That being said, his newest book, 1Q84, is not his best work. One of the more perplexing aspects of this book is how it was released. Obviously written and released in Japan, the book was then released in two parts in Britain earlier this year and then just released in the US as one book. Unfortunately for US readers, there is a lot of repetition, and inordinate amount really, when read as one work.
But to my first point, whatever Murakami writes now I will undoubtedly read, so I still recommend the work. 1Q84 is quintessential Murakami. I've read enough of his work now that I am confused as to where I've read the concept that Murakami perfectly captures being alone (as opposed to loneliness) so incredibly well. (He even touches on this point in this very book! Maybe he read one of my earlier reviews!)
Amazon description - The year is 1984, but not for long. Aomame bolts from the cab, walks onto the elevated Tokyo expressway, descends an emergency ladder to the street below, and enters a strange new world. In parallel, a math teacher and aspiring novelist named Tengo gets an interesting offer to rewrite a mysterious 17-year-old's story for the final round of a young writer's literary prize. So begins Haruki Murakami's magnum opus, an epic of staggering proportions that folds in a deliciously intriguing cast of characters and central motifs--the moon, Janáček's Sinfonietta, George Orwell's 1984--that acquire powerful resonance as Aomame and Tengo's paths take on a conjoined life of their own, dancing with a protracted elegance that requires nearly 1,000 pages to reach its crowning denouement. 1Q84 was a runaway bestseller in its native Japan, but more importantly, it's easily the grandest work of world literature since Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and represents a monstrous literary event. Now would somebody please award Murakami his Nobel Prize? --Jason Kirk
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