When Shinchosha decided not to run a pre-marketing campaign for Haruki Murakami¡¯s new and highly anticipated two-volume novel, the publishing house must have banked on the book creating its own hype. It worked. The void soon filled with publicity and media speculation about the book¡¯s only available information: its title.

In the weeks leading up to the release of ¡°1Q84,¡± Tokyo¡¯s radio talk-show hosts and television personalities buzzed on and on about probable links to George Orwell¡¯s ¡°Nineteen Eighty-Four.¡± (Confused? ¡°1Q84¡± is a pun playing on the identical pronunciation of the Japanese number ¡°nine¡± and the letter ¡°Q.¡°)

Nothing invites wordplay quite like wordplay. People have been quick to poke fun at ¡°1Q84¡± by calling it I.Q.-84. While this sort of joke may seem (excuse the pun) novel, revisiting ¡°Nineteen Eighty-Four¡± has not slipped out of fashion since the book¡¯s first printing in 1949. Terry Gilliam¡¯s dystopian film ¡°Brazil,¡± inspired by Orwell, had the working title of ¡°1984 and 1/2¡± and Anthony Burgess¡¯ two-part tribute to Orwell¡¯s work was entitled ¡°1985.¡± Now, in ¡°1Q84,¡± Murakami downsizes Orwell¡¯s totalitarian ¡°Big Brother¡± regime to a group known as ¡°little people.¡±