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Haruki Murakami has always been a cult writer, if one can say that about a novelist who regularly sells millions, both in his native Japan and in translation. Well, 1Q84 – an epic romance in three "books" and two volumes (Book 3, translated by Philip Gabriel, is published separately) – is his cult novel. In Underground (2000), Murakami interviewed former members of theAum sect and survivors of its 1995 nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway. In that book, he implicitly promised a fictional engagement with the subject of cults; now he has delivered.

At least two cults are active in this story. One is a Christian sect known as the Society of Witnesses, whose pamphleteering members refuse lifesaving surgery. The second cult is more Aum-ish and more mysterious. It is called Sakigake (which might mean "forerunner", "precursor", or "pioneer"), and from two wounded escapees we hear some very nasty things about its leader.