We discovered recently that a previous member of our Uncorrected Proof Book Club this year - Louis Bravos of Box Hill - had read Murakami's new novel 1Q84 when it was first released in Japan. Fascinated to find out more about the book ahead of its Australian release in November, we asked Louis to blog his initial thoughts on the novel, which he read in Japanese.

There's very little you or I could say about Haruki Murakami that has not been said before. The Japanese literary establishment looks down on his writing, criticising it as over-Americanised pop, but the sales figures in Japan and abroad disagree. Add to that the success of the recent cinema adaptation of perhaps his most famous novel, Norwegian Wood, and the anticipation readers of English are feeling for his latest work, 1Q84, show just how vastly different the opinions of the reading public, both in Japan and internationally, are to the opinions of the Japanese literary establishment. And there's also the fact that Murakami has won pretty much every literary award available to him, except the big one (and the words 'Nobel Prize' are often uttered in the same breath as his name) readers all over the world love Murakami's pastiche of magical-realism, with influences from hard boiled crime fiction, references to jazz and classical music, and the fact that in pulling together all these influences he manages to write so beautifully about the poetry of everyday life.

His latest, 1Q84 was all over Japan when it came out in 2009. The first printing of volumes one and two sold out in less than a day, but still there were critics. One Korean intellectual described the title as a misprint of IQ84, the average intelligence of the book's audience.

And it makes sense. The book has everything Murakami's detractors despise, because it has everything his fans love. A story with multiple points of view (for the first time in Murakami's novels there are multiple chapters from the perspective of a woman) with slips between the real world and a mysterious other world, there's an everyman who is pulled into a situation out of his control, for the sake of a young mysterious authoress and an old aquaintance from primary school. Totaling just over 1500 pages in the Japanese (before that the longest Japanese story I'd read was Murakami's Tony Takitani, less than 20 pages) it will not disappoint Murakami fans, and will give those who aren't some ammunition. It has the same understated, slightly disassociated narrative voice as Murakami's previous works, with a complexity and depth greater than any before.

As well as looking forward to being able to read Murakami's latest in my native tongue, as an aspiring translator I'm eager to read Jay Rubin's translation. Every translation I've read of Rubin's, not just of Murakami but also of such Japanese literary giants as Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, has managed to maintain that elusive goal of being both fresh and modern in tone and giving a true and accurate insight into a foreign literature and through it a foreign way of life. It was Murakami in translation that got me interested in Japanese literature, and convinced me to start studying Japanese and ultimately to live and work in Japan. Murakami's latest is just as fresh, complex and intriguing as his previous works, and thoroughly worth the wait.

Louis Bravos blogs at mlbrnnoir.tumblr.com and you can follow him on twitter - @lou1sb

1Q84 is out in Australia in November; all three volumes to be included in the one edition.