Similarly, the murder of Aomame’s police friend, which may or may not have had something to do with the Leader and Sakigawe, are left unresolved.

The final third of IQ84 appears to contract in some senses: the questions Tengo has had about his father and mother, questions in large part driven by intense visions about his mother that left him momentarily depleted, are largely put to one side, as are questions about the peculiar disappearance of his married lover (but fans of Murakami will recognise disappearing characters as one of his favourite tropes, stretching all the way back to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle). Despite his ugly face and the reaction he engenders in other people, Ushikara is a good character and his chapters are amongst the most entertaining elements of IQ84, book 3. Ushikara, a former lawyer, now in the employ of Sakigawe, is on the trail of Aomame for the perceived murder of the Leader. Where books 1 & 2 zinged back and forth between Aomame and Tengo, book 3 introduces a new element: Ushikara, the grotesque man with the oddly shaped head who we met back in book 2. A large portion of the book finds Aomame sitting on a veranda watching the park out front of her apartment while Tengo sits beside a bed, conversing with nurses and reading to his comatose father. Book 3 feels tighter and more urgent, even as the plot itself moves less frenetically than it has previously.

Straight away, though, we are faced with differences too, the most palpable being that Philip Gabriel translates Murakami differently to Jay Rubin (I don’t speak Japanese and can’t do a line by line analysis but there is a distinct change in tone between books 1 & 2 and book 3). The third instalment of IQ84 takes up where book 2 left off, with Aomame tucked away in the safe house trying to work out her next move and Tengo perched in the cat town waiting for his father to die.

Iq 84 book