1Q84 (いちきゅうはちよん Ichi-Kyū-Hachi-Yon) is a dystopian novel written by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, first published in three volumes in Japan in 2009–10. It covers a fictionalized year of 1984 in parallel with a "real" one. Its first printing sold out on the day it was released and sales reached a million within a month. The English-language edition of all three volumes, with the first two volumes translated by Jay Rubin and the third by Philip Gabriel, was released in North America and the United Kingdom on October 25, 2011. An excerpt from the novel, "Town of Cats", appeared in the September 5, 2011 issue of The New Yorker magazine. The first chapter of 1Q84 had also been read as an excerpt in the Selected Shorts series at Symphony Space in New York.