Readers can't wait for latest Murakami

It is a launch more reminiscent of a Harry Potter book than a long, difficult novel by a Japanese author, but in the United States bookshops are planning to stay open until midnight to cope with the demand for the translation of Haruki Murakami's 1000-page trilogy, 1Q84.

There is a video trailer on YouTube and Spotify song lists of music associated with the jazz-loving author.

Others have put up their own sections of translation on the internet for fans, unwilling to wait the two years it has taken since the book was published in Japan, selling an extraordinary 1 million copies in two months.

Literary blogs have pored over revelations about plot and character and over themes Murakami has visited before - from love to messianic cults to cats and music, to his use of surreal devices.

Murakami's English-language publishers, Knopf in the US and Harvill Secker in the UK, as well as booksellers, are anticipating an equally extraordinary level of interest when 1Q84, a play on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, is published next month.

The story follows the characters of Aomame, a hired killer, and Tengo, a novelist, whose lives increasingly overlap in a world that seems ever more unreal.

One of his regular translators, Jay Rubin, says

Murakami has an ability to convey the commonplace in an extraordinary way.

"What I love," he said, "is how he can describe eating yoghurt at midnight or the best way to cook a hamburger or someone pouring ketchup into a sock drawer.

"He is very down-to-earth, but also has passages that are very comically detailed.

"And it is not because he is writing about Japan that people love him. I'm not sure his readers are interested in Japan. It is about the moment-to-moment sensation of being in his world."

The first two books of 1Q84 are being published in a single volume on October 18 and the third on October 25.

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