After Dark - Books (Haruki Murakami, Paperback)

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Customer Reviews of After Dark

Manchester Manual
Manchester, UK
29th November 2008

What's the story, morning glory?
After Dark has all the Murakami hallmarks of isolation, chance meetings, surrealism, and urban existentialism. The story opens with Mari reading alone in a fast food restaurant a little before midnight. She is soon joined by the drifting student, Takahasi, on a break from band practice. These two part and separate through the night as Murakami explores its peace and violence in his own cool style. As with his other books this style is one which resists easy endings, but here he is so inconclusive that as dawn breaks on Tokyo one wonders if his lightness of touch comes at the cost his story.

stevieby
UK
21st November 2008

Combination of the absurd and the nerd
Not much to criticize about minimalism. (But I try...)

I guess Murakami goes on writing because his books continue to be published, and I guess his books continue to be published because people like me go on reading them, but Why do I go on reading them ?... I have no idea!

Reading this book is like listening to modern jazz - the grating kind which gets on your nerves! There is a long description of a television set which starts to produce a picture, although the set is unplugged. Then a sleeping girl somehow passes through the screen to a room on the other side....
A metaphor for death perhaps? Has technology taken over our lives to the extent it absorbs our ideas of spirituality? In any case, I found it jarring.

Then there is the constant use of the hyperbolic: "precision-crafted, anonymous mask" or "pencils sharpened to perfection."

This combination of the absurd and the nerd makes it hard to take the whole book seriously, in particular the sprinkling of pseudo-psychology/philosophy (amongst the extremely bland).

The story is fairly minimal, so not much to dislike there! The characters are stock.

Part of Murakami's secret to to promise a lot - to expose the inner workings of the Japanese underworld, the mysteries of the Japanese mind, even! What he delivers is a pastiche blended with his own brand of weirdness.

Why do I go on reading his books - I suppose in the hope one will turn out half as good as Norwegian Wood. This one isn't close.

Ruthie
Bristol, UK
19th September 2008

Absolutely brilliant, and a quick read to boot!
This is the best book I've read for ages. I gobbled it up in a weekend because I just couldn't put it down - and I'm quite a slow reader! If you are looking for something to make you think a bit and twist your view of reality a little this is the book for you. Kept thinking about it for ages after I'd finished. I would recommend this to almost anyone!!!!

Brownbear101
London United Kingdom
17th September 2008

A Bit of a Rip Off
This was my first Murakami book and I was left feel distinctly shortchanged. Although it is elegantly written (and translated) and does a masterful job of evoking Tokyo at night, it feels more like a writing exercise than a fully grown novel, or even novella.

The story takes place in a single night and concerns a blossoming friendship between a young girl, Eli, and a male student and jazz musician. This is set against a background of a prostitute being beaten up in a love hote by a client and subsequent events. At the same time Eli's sister lies in a sort of coma/deep sleep.

I particularly disliked the writing device that the reader and the author are controlling a camera to see events. This becomes extremely irritating and makes the book read like an agonising art house film script. Another disappointment, at least for me, was the inability or unwillingness to bring the threads of the book together even slightly. I don't need all the dots joined but I was left thinking that that this was a series of parallel paths not really held together by the narrative - perhaps I just don't get it.

John Kwok
New York, NY USA
9th August 2008

Among Haruki Murakami's Best Novels in Recent Memory: A Sublime, Lyrical Ode to the Night
Ten years have passed since I encountered for the very first time, the enigmatic, but fascinating, psychological and cultural landscapes conjured by Haruki Murakami in such spellbinding works as "Dance Dance Dance", "A Wild Sheep Chase", and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World". At first, I thought he was a Japanese version of J. G. Ballard and Angela Carter, drawing upon both contemporary realities and classic fairy tales to render vivid, surreal versions of the present, in a literary style that I thought was so reminiscent of modern science fiction and fantasy. But soon I realized that he was such an astute, and elegant, observer of the real world too, in novels like "Norwegian Wood", "Sputnik Sweetheart", and especially, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" (The latter a most treasured part of my personal library, blessed with his autographed signature in both English and Japanese, that I still feel quite lucky to have acquired while meeting him in person at a New York City literary festival book signing a few years ago.). Here, in "After Dark", Murakami has written among his best novels in recent memory (Quite possibly among the very best published this year too.), emphasizing a realistic, quasi-documentary film exploration of the hours between midnight and dawn, set in a recognizable, if slightly surreal, Tokyo landscape of American diners ("Denny's") and prostitution dens ("love hotels").

This tersely-worded novel on nocturnal encounters features the intertwining tales of two sisters; Eri, a fashion model who appears occasionally as an ever-present sleeper - and whose appearances seem most pregnant with meaning - and Mari, a young college student, who is drawn inexplicably into a series of chance encounters with a brutally beaten Chinese prostitute and a Japanese jazz trombonist. These chance encounters move inexorably from mere happenstance to elaborate excursions into empathy, compassion, and love. Mari becomes not simply a casual voyeur into this nocturnal realm, but rather, an active participant, whose very presence determines the "fates" of those she has met. Throughout, Murakami's keen sense of mordant humor and crisp, snappy dialogue remains quite acute, demonstrating that he is still a literary master in depicting the human condition. A literary master who has rendered such a captivating, almost universal, tale that is so rich in scope, even if it is so terse in its length; one which ought to be well-received by his legion of fans across the globe.