Title: After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Paperback: 256 pages; Kindle; Audiobook
Publisher: Vintage (April 29, 2008)
Haruki Murakami's latest novel, After Dark, begins just before midnight in Tokyo and ends just before 7 a.m. The focus is Tokyo in the dead of night, after the trains have stopped running and the only public transportation out of the city is by cab.
Some of the people left in the city are college students and office workers. They are in the bars, hanging out in all night restaurants, in game parlors, or working late in the office.
The book follows a young college student, Mari, who decides to stay reading in a Denny's restaurant rather than go home. She meets another college student there, a musician who is in the city to practice with his band. At his suggestion, Mari leaves the restaurant to help a foreign woman who has been injured, and in the course of events, comes across unusual situations and makes some unlikely friends, including the manager and maid of an all night hotel. Long conversations during the night with the musician, who has met her older sister, help her come to terms with the reason she has avoided going home.
When morning arrives and the trains are running, Mari goes home to the suburbs, where she knows she will find her older sister, Eri Asai, still in a deep sleep. A beautiful and well-known model, Eri Asai has been sleeping steadily the past three weeks, getting up occasionally to eat, though no one has seen her when she is up.
Remembering how protective Eri Asai had been of her when they had been trapped in an elevator as children, Mari tries to empathize with her sister, in tears hugging her as if willing her to wake up out of her long dream. There is a glimmer of a response. Mari finally goes to sleep.
The novel only hints at the reason for Eri Asi's withdrawal. There is a suggestion that it involves the sinister office worker Shirakawa, whom Mari is unaware of though their paths overlap during the night in the city.
The novel has many levels of meaning. Murakami reveals the flip side of the city, after dark, at times with humor. The city at night also reveals the dark aspect of some of the characters he explores. Mari and the musician walk about the city and among these people but remain unscathed.
Submitted for the Lost in Translation Reading Challenge. and resubmitted for the 2012 Haruki Murakami Reading Challenge.
© Harvee Lau of Book Dilettante. Please do not reprint without permission.
I like the idea of the story line, but not sure it is the type of book I would pick up. BZ
ReplyDeleteThis the first Murakami book I've read and it's certainly one of my favorites. The author's almost-musical prose makes the novel both addictively-entertaining and mildly-perplexing.
ReplyDeleteI liked the idea behind the story a little better than the story itself for this one, but Murakami always makes for an interesting read.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link to your review, I've added it to mine.
BZ, Mark David, tanabata: I appreciate your comments. It is a cryptic novel in a way, but I knew someone like the curious, mysterious sister in an coma, and so the novel seemed to have more significance to me. In other words, it blew me away!
ReplyDeleteI like how you talk about the layers in the novel and how Murakami captures the life After Dark. But while there is so much happening in the novel, i think you are right to focus on this story between two people.
ReplyDeleteHave you noticed how murakami constantly refers to divides and empty shells in his novels?
thanks for dropping by my review. :)
Great review. I almost picked this one up for last year's Murakami Challenge, but ran out of time. Maybe I'll try to get to it by the end of the year. I'm reading Spuntnik Sweetheart right now. I've only just read the first Chapter or two.. too early to tell if I'm enjoying it yet. ;)
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