1Q84 Book 3 by Haruki Murakami

In the third and final book of the 1Q84 trilogy Murakami continues his alternating chapters chronicling Tengo and Aomame's lives, she on the run from the Sakigake religious cult, he coping with the slipping of his estranged father further away from him into a coma.  But we now have a third set of chapters, from the grotesquely deformed private detective Ushikawa, employed by Sakigake to find Aomame and establish the truth regarding her role in the death of the cult's Leader.  As two moons, our normal satellite and a malformed smaller green companion, rise in the sky, the three main narrators dance around each other, slowly drawing closer until their worlds collide and Aomame takes a stand.  As the climax comes the narrative begins to fragment, words begin to slip and continuity becomes a little shaky.  The chapters don't run in chronological order, time sliding in this 'wrong' world.  And all beautifully written.

1Q84 Books 1 & 2 by Haruki Murakami

Murakami introduces us to a cast of characters that are deeply moral and indeed gentle, ironic given that two of them are killers. As Aomame is on the Tokyo expressway in a taxi snarled in traffic the suggestion by the driver that she climb down the emergency stairway to make her appointment on time is the beginning of a shift, she is pitched into a new world, from 1984 to 1Q84, a world in which there are two moons. She makes her appointment, to dispatch a beater of women into the next world with a delicate touch, and remembers her past, her upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness and a boy, Tengo, whom she has never seen since elementary school but is drawn to. We alternate between her narrative and that of Tengo, a maths teacher at a Tokyo cramming school and part time writer, a man with a weekly lover but who is haunted by his memories of Aomame and unable to form any other permanent relationships with women. He is engaged to ghost edit the work of a young 17 year old girl and is pitched into a strange world of supernatural forces. Though slow to start, I really enjoyed being immersed in Japanese culture which in its reticence and attention to manners is similar to the British psyche, and by the end of the second book I was completely hooked. Can't wait for the third one