My Rating - 5 Stars
Published - January 1st 2004
A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore.
At its center are two sisters—Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before, a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri’s slumber—mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime—will either restore or annihilate her.
After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency—the interplay between self-expression and empathy, between the power of observation and the scope of compassion and love. Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery
My Review
I heard somewhere that Murakami is the favourite to take away the Nobel prize for fiction this year, and naturally I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I wasn't disappointed.
Imagine a literary version of David Lynch, that's probably the best way to describe Murakami. After Dark isn't so much a story as it is an experience.
Set on a winters night in central Tokyo, After Dark follows several individuals whose paths criss-cross over the proceeding 7 hours. The stories are slowly merged chapter by chapter until they form a cohesive whole. The result of this process illustrates in turn, both the dichotomy and harmony between the individual and the collective.
I read After Dark mainly at night, which definitely suited the mood of the book and added to its charm. Murakami has an enviable ability to make the mundane come to life. A winters night becomes a magical playground full of experiences, meaning and realisation. Maybe anything can be interesting if you look at it in an abstract enough way.
This is my first Murakami but definitely won't be my last.
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