Genre - Contemporary fiction My Rating - 5 Stars Published - January 1st 2004
Synopsis 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.
Genre - Contemporary Fiction My Rating - 5 Stars Published - March 1st 2012 by Canongate Synopsis Every family has a story. Mal was ours. He was always different from the other kids. Larger than life. Trips to pantomimes were ruined by him stripping off his clothes. But people loved him. Especially Lou; it seemed like their love would last forever. Then something happened that changed everything ...Mal grew up. My Review Bed is almost too good. Every once in a while I read something so special and unique to me that I want to hide it away from a world of prying eyes, criticism and make it mine. Despite being long listed for the Desmond Elliot Prize this novel hasn't got the critical acclaim it deserves, and it's 3.19 rating on Goodreads is quite frankly a disgrace. So what went wrong and why is this book so misunderstood? Bed is about Mal, a discontented 25 year old who hounded by an unbearable ennui, decides he's going to bed, and staying there. After 20 years laying naked in bed doing nothing but watching TV and eating food cooked by his over-zealous mother he weighs 100 stone. But this isn't a book about being fat and if you're reading it in the hope of an insight into obesity then you should look elsewhere. Bed is a book about love, the bonds between family, how one persons selfishness can bring people together and at the same time tear them apart. Told from the perspective of Mal's younger brother (we never learn his name) he describes Mal as a planet which the family are orbiting. An ambitious young man, Mal left school telling the careers officer he wants to change the world, but like so many of us 2 years later he finds himself working a 9-5 office job with a steady girlfriend. This isn't the life Mal wants, he hates the banality of the weekly grind but feels that there is no way out. I view Mal as the ultimate individual, a man with a voracious appetite for the extraordinary who is unable to find fulfilment in the real world outside his dreams. So he goes to bed. The only rightful protest he can make against the cruel disappointment of living in a society that raises its children with an expectation of future greatness, and fails to deliver. You may not like Bed, a lot of readers hated the graphic descriptions of Mal's obesity. It's certainly not a book for the squeamish and some scenes will probably shock you. But if you can get past the imagery and read Bed with an open mind it will repay you in buckets. Some books feel like they can tear a fissure in your life leaving an invisible before and after, it's an unsettling experience but also quite mind blowing. I love this book, a day later i'm still reeling.
