Bookworms right across Japan are flipping the pages of “1Q84″, the latest novel by Haruki Murakami. The print run of the hardback version has already topped the 740,000 copies of his earlier work “Kafka on the Shore”, and more than 1 million copies are likely to have hit the store shelves by the end of this month.

“If a literary work sells 50,000 copies, we call that a bestseller. With 100,000 copies, that’s a huge success,” Fumiaki Mori, a spokesman for publisher Shinchosha Publishing Co Ltd, told me. “By that standard, reaching this number in about 10 days since sales began is a very fast pace.”

The two-volume novel, Murakami’s first since 2004’s “After Dark”, explores thought control, cults, abuse and other issues and takes place in Tokyo in the year 1Q84.

The title borrows heavily from George Orwell’s “1984″, as the Japanese for 9 is pronounced the same as the English letter Q. Some readers have said that “1Q84” seems to sum up all of Murakami’s works.