After Dark - Books (Haruki Murakami, Paperback)

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Customer Reviews of After Dark

N. Kastanje
Denmark
1st January 2009

After Dark
"Kafka on the Shore" was brilliant, and "The Windup Bird" and "A wild Sheep Chase" very good. But "After Dark" was my first real disappointment since I started reading Haruki Marakumi. It is just too strange, and I feel like I never really got to know any of the characters in it. But I am not giving up on Marakumi and neither should anybody else who feel the same about "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.