A Pun!

I've found my first Japanese pun, a landmark in any language learning process. This comes from the Japanese title of Haruki Murakami's latest novel, IQ84. I became a fan of Murakami after reading "Kafka on the Shore" a few months ago, and he's been one of the big writers which I intend to read in the original once I can. Anyway, I was browsing in the Japanese bookstore downtown called "Book Off" when I saw the Murakami. I took a look at the cover, since I recognized it from reading about it:

As you can see, it has the title in numeric characters (1Q84), as well as a romanization of the Japanese (Ichi kew hachi yon). Q, as one of Rome's oddest letters, does not exist in Japanese, and is thus romanized as "kew." But interestingly enough, "kew" is almost phonetically identical to "きゅう", Japanese for 9. Thus, the title can be read as 1-Q-84, IQ84 (using the first alphanumeric reading), or 1984, the name of the famous Orwell novel upon which the novel is partially based. I informed my father, a major Murakami fan, of this, and he had not heard about it in any reviews or articles on the book. These kind of little tidbits and puns are part of the joy of language-learning, and I'm glad that I'm able to notice these details that I otherwise would've missed.