The last novel by the most famous author of contemporary Japanese prose, the chief literary sensation of the new century—“the magnum opus of the celebrated master” and “a must-read for anyone who wants to understand Japanese culture of our day,” as critics put it. The action of the book takes place not so much in nineteen eighty-four as in nineteen hundred and eighty-four, in a world where some people see two moons in the sky, where the key to eternal love is the “Symphonietta” by Janáček, where after a shootout with cultists that shook the whole country, the police were reequipped with automatic pistols instead of revolvers, where Little People—“the Little Folk”—come out of the mouth of a dead goat and weave the Air Cocoon.