Last April, Quillblog pointed to the mass excitement in Japan surrounding the release of the third volume of 1Q84, the first full-length novel from Haruki Murakami since 2002’s Kafka on the Shore. In his home country, Murakami is a cultural icon; as if to prove this, fans lined up in the rain to get their hands on a midnight release of 1Q84, volume three. It’s hard to imagine North American readers lining up for a book that doesn’t feature teenage vampires a character named Harry Potter, but regardless, Knopf has announced a firm on-sale date for the English edition of 1Q84: Oct. 25. The English version will appear in a single, 1,000-page edition translated by Jay Rubin.

From the Guardian:

The title of 1Q84 is taken to be a play on George Orwell’s 1984 “ the Japanese number nine having the same pronunciation as the letter Q “ though others have also suggested the title is a tribute to The True Story of Ah Q, a novella by Chinese writer Lu Xun.

True to form, the story features a surreal narrative and enigmatic characters, including Aomame, a 30-year-old woman whose name means “Green Bean.” Aomame “ who wanders into a form of parallel reality early in the novel, which she detects by observing minute differences in the physical world around her “ commits a series of murders for reasons that are at first obscure.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the announcement is the means used to disseminate it. According to the Guardian, Knopf U.S. publicity director Paul Bogaards tweeted the news. “Booyah!” Bogaards wrote. “Midnight store openings for this one?”