After Dark

First off, to address the (vanishing) elephant in the room, "After Dark" is not Murakami Haruki's best novel to date. And I say that as someone who habitually enjoys Murakami's fiction, and as someone who liked this latest novel of his well enough. It is not nearly as excellent as the hyper-laudatory critical blurbs planted strategically all over the surface of the book tell you. But then again, it is not nearly as bad as the knowingly harsh naysayers claim, either. If it's a rather lukewarmly average work for an author of Murakami's caliber, it's still way ahead of the game overall. Familiar and yet compellingly surreal, hauntingly eerie and yet laced with an offhand casual humor, unpretentiously grappling with the big questions in life while avoiding pat answers, hip in just the right measure, putting the "fun" back in "literary" again, embedding a deeply ethical human quest within the surface trappings of a cleverly postmodern runaround--all those beloved elements that make up the bizarre alchemical blend of a Murakami novel are right here in "After Dark" as well, even if the mix is a bit off this time around.

Time will tell, but my sense is that this novel is a transitional work in Murakami's development as a writer. Old themes and literary tropes echo here in a somewhat weak form: the double-helix structure from "Hard-Boiled Wonderland", the nagging unrest with Japan's submerged imperialist history from "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", that ubiquitous other side perhaps most clearly delineated in "Sputnik Sweetheart" and "Kafka on the Shore" and many more. It's rather as if Murakami is taking stock of his twilight landscapes before moving on. And this novel does find him trying new things. The book begins and ends with some of the most amazingly meditative and lyrical passages I've yet seen from him. He is more self-consciously experimental than usual with point-of-view (giving the novel a strangely cinematic feel, though what a weird movie it would be!). Structuring his rather diffuse tale according to the advancing hours of one single night was satisfyingly inventive, and helps contain what would otherwise be a ball of yarn spinning utterly out of control. Devil that he is, he denies the poor reader narrative closure as usual, but he tries his best (not so convincingly, perhaps) to end on a brighter note of hope than is usual for him. He is also starting to transcend the self-absorbed first-person male narrator and some of that persona's usual hang-ups, the possibilities of which he has pretty much fully explored and perhaps more or less exhausted.

As the oddly omniscient narrator accompanying the reader says on page 237, "Many people go on mumbling the old words, but in the light of the newly revealed sun, the meanings of words are shifting rapidly and are being renewed."

On a different note, I highly recommend reading this novel late at night. Some of what Murakami writes herein might seem flat and maybe just a bit insipid in the cut-and-dry daylight, but those same passages hit the mood just right and give a mild case of the metaphysical chills *after dark*. Indeed, Murakami masterfully gets at that unsettlingly surreal, sort of spooky atmosphere that lingers from the witching hour to the first rays of dawn. And of course, if you can find an all-night Denny's, all the better.

"After Dark" was first published in Japan in 2004, and was translated into English by Jay Rubin in 2008.

The book opens up in an `amusement district'- an area dedicated to gaming centres, karaoke clubs and bars. It's approaching midnight and - while plenty of others are enjoying themselves loudly - Mari Asai is sitting alone in a Denny's Restaurant. She's apparently missed the last train home - almost deliberately, by the looks of things - although she still occasionally glances towards her watch. She doesn't appear to be expecting any company either - she's buried in a book, nursing a coffee and occasionally lighting a cigarette and buried in a book. (Mari lights a lot of cigarettes, but she doesn't do much smoking...they tend to burn themselves out in the ashtray.) However, Mari isn't left alone for long, however - she's joined by a lanky young man called Tetsuya Takahashi. The pair had met a couple of years before at a swimming pool - a friend of Takahashi's was dating Mari's glamourous and beautiful sister, Eri.

Takahashi and Eri had been in class together for a year, but they never spoke - she never gave him the time of day. By the sounds of things, he and Mari didn't speak much on the date either - despite being Japanese, Mari spent most of her time speaking Chinese. The pair communicate a little better this time round, though Takahashi initially won't give his name. However, when he finally leaves for band practice, Takahashi leaves his mobile number and promises to be back around 5am...despite Mari's apparent coolness towards him. Nevertheless, Mari doesn't get left alone for too long - she's soon joined by Koaru, who works at a nearby `love hotel' called the Alphaville. (They tend to be `Big in Japan'). Koaru is obviously an acquaintance of Takahashi's - though she's a little circumspect about how they met. She has a problem, though - there's a Chinese girl at her hotel, "in a mess", and Takahashi has told her that Mari is fluent in Chinese. Koaru wants to find out what happened - but she needs someone who can translate for her...

Meanwhile Eri is at home in a very deep sleep - so deep and pure, it's just not normal. She's in for a very strange night, though - despite being unplugged, her tv comes on at midnight. The picture, when it finally settles, shows a large empty room - most likely, an office or a classroom. There's only one person in the room - a man, sitting on the room's only chair, apparently deep in thought. Where most people would be happy enough to meet a television star, this is one you'd really rather avoid.

The book's events take place over a single night, with Mari and Eri proving to be the two key characters...though I did enjoy Mari's story more. (Takahashi and Koaru proved two very likeable supporting characters - I finished the book hoping that Mari kept in touch with both. However, there are one or two others who aren't quite so agreeable). Eri's story was a little strange, a little like something that might have been used for `The Twilight Zone'. It was a little frustrating that there was no real explanation of what was happening to her, or what man in the television set wanted...but "After Dark" is a short, easily read and enjoyable book overall.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami: In Haruki Murakami's latest novel, After Dark, he tells a unique and compelling story of what goes on after midnight on the streets of Tokyo. It is a very different world from that of the daytime, with very different people. Murakami makes this clear by revealing that the rules of physics and reality don't necessarily apply.

The story begins with a young girl, Mari Asai, reading a book at Denny's after midnight, but it immediately jumps to the unusual, as Mari is greeted by a boy she hasn't seen in a while who sits opposite her and begins conversing. She admits she plans on spending the night out, doing anything other than sleeping. The boy, Tetsuya Takahashi, tells her about his late night band practices - he is a trombonist. After he leaves for his practice, a short while passes before a strange, rough looking woman comes into Denny's and walks straight up to Mari, telling her she is the manager of a love hotel and has found a beaten girl who only speaks Chinese in one of her rooms; Takahashi told her Mari speaks Chinese. So begins an adventurous - and at times dark and morbid - night.

After Dark tells of various characters who all go about their lives during the early morning hours in Tokyo, but who are intrinsically linked and will cross paths one or more times during the night. At the heart of the story is Mari and her love for her beautiful sister, to whom she is no longer close. Eri Asai was a girl born with a special beauty, but recently gave up on life and now spends her days and nights in a deep, almost catatonic sleep. But she is just one cast member whose life is affected on this particular night.

Murakami uses a floating camera narrator to take the reader everywhere and anywhere, where there are no bounds, where things are dark and scary. After Dark is a short, but haunting tale with some special characters who will stay with you long after you have closed the book and put it aside.

[...]

Lost souls in Tokyo.

A girl whose sister decided to go to sleep and still hasn't woken up a few months later. She can't stand sleeping in the next room, so finds ways to stay out all night. Hangs out at Denny's.

A kid in a band who once had a crush on the sister; now intrigued by the girl in Denny's.

A former female wrestler, now manager of a "love hotel" -- where a Chinese prostitute gets beaten up by a frustrated businessman.

The businessman who doesn't like to go home at night either, works all night and occasionally hires prostitutes.

The sleeping sister, who is being watched by a man on the other side of a television screen. At times the sister also appears on the other side of the television screen -- trapped, confused, lost. A metaphor for someone whose identity is bound up in representations: a model?

The enigmatic watcher, who has gotten dirty somehow, and we never know why.

It's an intriguing constellation of characters, who circle vaguely around one another, but whose trajectories never quite develop into a compelling story. All inconclusive in the end.

There is a speculative edge here: something to do with sleep as a metaphor for inaction, or for the condition of being nothing more than an image, a model, an empty ideal. This element felt undeveloped to me: mere speculation without anything conclusive.

This is the second book I've read by Murakami, and I don't know if this is true of all his works but both translations sound a little odd. Reading him is almost like reading subtitles for a foreign film. It never quite sounds right, but suggests something intriguing behind it all. The Wild Sheep Chase worked for me: odd and twisty, but with intriguing ideas that went somewhere. In this case I'm not sure. I might have to read it again, but first impressions on a first look aren't strong enough to motivate the second read.

Haruki Murakami's After Dark is more novella than novel. Indeed, the US edition weighs in at only 191 pages. I was a bit put off by its length, to tell you the truth, yet I discovered that the book is as long as it needs to be. Murakami's tale draws you in and won't let go, and soon the number of pages becomes meaningless.

This magical realism story is an intimate narrative that follows the interwoven storylines between a number of disparate characters: Mari, a young student determined to spend the night away from home; Eri, her sister, a fashion model who's been slumbering inexplicably for the last two months; Takahashi, a jazz trombonist who stumbles upon Mari and recognizes her; Kaoru, the manager of a "love hotel" and her staff; a Chinese prostitute brutalized by a customer; Shirakawa, the businessman who beat up the hooker. After Dark explores how these men and women are all related, with everything occurring during the span of a single Tokyo night.

In this flawless translation, Haruki Murakami's impeccable, evocative prose expounds on the different states of loneliness.

The dialogues, even when they appear innocuous, show a lot of insight, while the deep and more thoughtful conversations are a delight.

Still, it's the atmosphere created by the author which makes After Dark a special read. The ambience is sublime, as if the night became a character in its own right. The darkness becomes a time of revelations, a period of transition in the lives of the cast.

As a short, sleek book, After Dark is perfect for the beach, the plain, or the train. Bring this one along with you on vacation and you won't be disappointed!

This is a poetic book, a dream full of suggestion and implication. It resembles his love stories (Norwegian Wood, South of the Border) more than the epics (Wind-Up Bird, Kafka on the Shore), but as in every Murakami novel there are enough mysteries and coincidences to keep the reader guessing and pondering long after the final page. I'd suggest reading this one in one sitting, like a novella. I read the first half before going to bed over several nights, thinking that maybe it would give me cool dreams, but that kind of reading prevented me from feeling the flow that runs through the work. Reading the second half all at once was more rewarding (though second halves usually do have more to offer.) I'd also suggest reading the book late at night - even if you don't, you'll feel like it's late at night. The book is an excellent journey through Nighttown. It's less inventive than, say, Joyce's trip to the other side, but Murakami makes great use of the cell-phones, plastic, televisions, and love hotels of our contemporary reality. At first glance, this book is familiarly saturated with the detritus of the 21st century, but in the end the ghosts, spirits, loss, and love are the timeless stuff of dreams, faith, and literature. The book is slighter than Murakami's great works, but it's still well worth reading. And the cover of the hardcover edition is really cool. Thanks to the bars in front of the image, I can't tell if it's a video arcade or a 7-11 with weird lighting, but either of them seems right.

First off, this is an excellent translation from the Japanese. But that is the only thing that stands out in this book. This was my first Murakami novel I have ever read and I am still not sure what to think. The story didn't connect for me in the end. I enjoyed the dialogue between Mari and Takahashi and even the scenes at the love hotel with Kaoru. But what was with the third-party scenes into Eri's bedroom and what, if any, was the connection between Eri and the guy who beat the Chinese prostitute. It never connected to me when she woke in the room and found the pencil from his company, but it appears the author intended to leave much to the reader's imagination and inference. Overall, it was a dreamy little story over one night in Tokyo that left me wanting.

I am a bit of a Murakami addict. I can admit this. Getting that out of way, I will try to review this book in a way that others less starstruck of Murakami's talents may find more useful.

The aura and mood of the book is top-notch. It's possibly as pure as anything Murakami has achieved in terms of atmosphere. The characters are basic and familiar, but they're still likable enough to care about their every action and word. Late night in urban Japan is represented in this book remarkably well, and the pacing flows masterfully from beginning to end.

All that said, the book is a bit shallow. It seems like it probably took less time to write than many of Murakami's other works, and it may have very well started out as a short story that grew legs and ran for 2 two or three hundred pages. There is action in the story, but most of the book is foreshadowing and the implantation of constant dread, though I don't consider that bad, and the conclusion is for the most part open-ended. I enjoyed the book most certainly, but others less in love with Murakami's style may find the book, like I said, to be a bit dull and shallow. 5 stars for me, but I give it 4 stars as a book that stands on its own without the luster of its writer's name on the front cover.

Murakami is excellent with mood pieces, and 'After Dark' is a brilliant study of characters who inhabit the after hours for various reasons; some to jam with bandmates in a jazz ensemble, others to flee a checkered past, or to seek some solace away from a difficult home condition.

Chapters are marked out with timings as the night progresses, as the ensemble of characters cross paths with cinematic precision, reflective of Murakami's clean sharp prose (once again brilliantly translated by the ever-reliable Jay Rubin).

This novel is an insomniac's dream come true, with detailed description of the nightscape that betray undisguised film aspirations. This is especially seen in the dream-like sequences, featuring a girl who is (perhaps willingly) lulled into a comatose state. The narrator beckons the reader to take on the 'viewpoint... of a midair camera' and the scene transforms into a still from "Through the Looking Glass".

Beautifully written, and like most Murakami pieces go, there's little resolution in the end, which is arguably fitting as a detached observation of the slice of time between midnight and daybreak.

"After Dark" is Murakami’s ode to the night. The author creates a new reality within Tokyo where he spent the most of his life. Here, Tokyo appears as a blend of cultural backgrounds and a sad testament to the homogeneity of modern-day countries. Throughout the novel, the topic of duality arises in not only the city, which seems to be a mixture of western cultures, but also as the characters who live and act in completely different ways from each other. The author hovers above the city and captures the character’s lives in a unique and revealing way, as if through lens of a camera. Just before midnight he zooms in on a nineteen-year-old Mari Asai who sits alone at Denny’s waiting for the night to pass. A chain of unexpected visitors approach her and slowly drag her into a mysterious crime-drama that has taken place earlier at the love-hotel down the road. Throughout the duration of a single night, Murakami’s masterpiece succeeds in creating a window into the lives of people we get to know so well. Our presence stays unnoticed during their dialogs and deep personal talks, and we quietly follow them through the dark streets all the way to the dawn.

My third Murakami novel, and for a while I thought it might be one I positively enjoyed. There is some humour here, and I was able to understand some of the cultural references. Murakami deceptively laces his work with Western cultural references, but it is a mistake to think that one can understand his novels without knowing a lot about Japan.

In this book there is a theme that seems to have reference to a Japanese cultural phenomenon where young people wall themselves up in their rooms and become totally uncommunicative - you need to understand that to see what is going on with one of the characters - Eri.

Other themes explored in the book are Murakami's obsession with a kind of dualism, where we have alter egos beyond our control (like the murderer of Kafka's father in "Kafka on the shore") He seems to link this with influence of animal spirits, and I can only suppose that is some kind of reference to japanese mysticism (Shinto perhaps?)

There is also bad sex as usual, with the love hotel theme which divorces sex from love and commitment. At least in this novel we are invited to see that this divorce is directly related to the evils of the attack described therein.

The whole narrative takes place in real time through the course of one night.

The problem with Murakami (other than the difficulty presented to readers not steeped in Japanese culture) is that his books really are trying too hard to be surreal and metaphorical. I read Kafka on the Shore first, and felt it was trying too hard - but now I feel that book was the best of the three I have read!

In this book the surrealism is just tagged on. It doesn't seem to have any reason for being there. The watcher in Eri's room... what is that all about? Frankly, I don't care! If a book requires so much work to interpret, then no two people will interpret it the same. Some people don't mind that, but what I want to know is what the author is telling me.

I don't need to read this book to know what I am thinking myself. A clear message still requires thought from the reader. Do we agree? What can we add? But works that defy understanding and jump around between realism and the surreal - well these are a lot of work for little reward.

Of course Murakami has his supporters, and many people will love the surrealism, the lack of conclusion, the dropped threads, the moral relativism, and of course the little in jokes (room 404 is surely a reference to the HTTP error code for "page not found").

So if you like Murakami or any of the above - read this book. Otherwise your time would be better spent with something else.

The one saving grace - the reason this gets two stars and not one - is that the book is short. Much shorter than "Kafka on the Shore", or the 'Wind up Bird Chronicle". It may be a waste of time reading it - but it won't be such a huge waste of time.

it is a good book, the first i read of this writing style- the style that describe life in a simple, matter of fact kind of tone.

it's about the dark, late hours of a night in tokyo. it's about pepole, living their lives, searching warmth. sometimes, their paths meet.

in the thin (even in the broad) sense of the way, there isn't an adventure. you don't fight to save the world, you don't fight some big evil. you just live. and yet, i found myself turning pages expectantly, curious what will happen next. wanting to get to know the characters. wanting to taste more.

Haruki Murakami isn't for everyone, but he is a unique experience.

As is almost always the case, strange yet familiar things happen in Murakami's latest novel. Over the course of a single evening, Murakami weaves together the stories of two sisters, one of whom is in a perpetual sleep-state and another who lives on the fringes, reading books in late night diners, an amateur trombonist, and a love hotel called Alphaville where a Chinese prostitute is beaten by a computer programmer who goes days without ever seeing his wife or children. The regular loneliness all of the characters, yet when you read about them on the page, you always can't help but wonder why it is they are so lonely or why it is no one in the fabric of Murakami's world, people are not all over them.

The narrative goes back and forth between the two sisters - Mari and Eri - and you keep reading at a faster and faster pace so as to find out how the two storylines intersect. Reading Murakami is as addictive as everyone says it is. I'm in my first year of law school and was still so engrossed that I finished this book in less than two days.

Both long-time Murakami fans and new ones alike will marvel at this work.

Dear Haruki Murakami, I am writing to you at three in the morning when most regular people are sound asleep in bed, like my husband is now, right beside me. No, this is not that kind of letter!

But this is the time period, between midnight and dawn, when all of the action in your novel "After Dark" takes place. You—or someone—might ask why is it necessary to write this pseudo-review during the same time-period that the novel itself takes place? I will answer like many of your characters answer each other when asked questions of this sort in your novels: with a shrug (which you can't see) and an enigmatic "dunno."

Like many of the women in your novels—and like Mari Esai in this one—I have my reasons but my reasons for doing anything (or nothing) are often not communicable through mere language. Or maybe I just don't want to share them for personal reasons. Or maybe I don't fully know the reason myself. Maybe that's the point; maybe that's the essential mystery of life: I'm trying to find out myself.

I'm always on the fence when it comes to you, Haruki. I know you're a great author and all that. They even said you were one of the odds-on favorites to win the Nobel Prize this year! You and Philip Roth and Alice Munro, who actually won. Good for you! You're still only 65 so you have plenty of time yet. You're even five years younger than Philip Roth, who's quit writing (so he says), so don't give up. Keep writing! If Philip Roth has really thrown in the towel, you'll catch up and pass him in no time.

Anyway, what I meant to say is that I always have mixed feelings about you. Not about you, personally, of course; naturally, I don't know anything about you personally; but about you as a writer, specifically, about your novels. From what I've read so far of your work, I think I might like your short stories better. About you personally, strange to say, but I get the sense that I would like you, if I knew you. At least if you were anything like most of the male protagonists in your stories, like Takahashi, for instance, in "After Dark." He is a fairly typical example of what I'm talking about.

Takahashi seems like a nice guy, earnest, a little naive maybe, questioning, a bit verbose, actually, even annoying to a woman who'd prefer (or thinks she prefers) to be alone, but at the same time he's considerate and patient. He doesn't force himself physically on a woman. He senses (without saying it) when a woman is in trouble or lonely or would like to open up or fall in love(but can't) or whatever—and he tries to help. He tries to do what he can, including go away if the woman insists (which most men won't, even if they swear they'd do anything for you, even die they love you so much. The one thing most of them won't do is leave!!). Anyway, your heroes remind me a little of my husband (still sleeping, by the way) in many ways (though not the annoying part, of course), many of these quietly heroic understanding male characters of yours. I might be mistaken, but I imagine you are like this, too.

But back to Takahashi. He's up all night because he's practicing with his jazz band in the basement of an unused building. He's a couple of years older than Mari, who's nineteen, and we learn that soon he'll give up playing music and get "serious" about his future and start studying law. He has a lot of interesting opinions about the law. For instance, he thinks it's something like a giant malevolent octopus. He's frankly a little afraid of it. He compares it to a beast into whose clutches any one of us might get entangled and devoured. Maybe for that reason he feels it all the more important to get to know it—and learn to defend others from falling innocent prey to it. See what I mean about him being a hero? At least that's the sense I get from what he says about the subject.

In fact, what he actually says is this: "Any single human being, no matter what kind of a person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle."

You get the feeling that he's talking about more than just the law here. That he's talking about life itself. Or what opposes life and eventually consumes it, which, of course, is the inevitability of death...oblivion, probably. It's a pretty grim view of life from a basically optimistic happy-go-lucky character. But that's the thing about Takahashi. He's a lot deeper than he looks. He's seen a lot of darkness in his own life; but he prefers to turn his face toward the sun. And he's trying to get Mari to do so, too. That's what makes him a hero. He's not trying to save the world, just one girl, maybe, two, if you count Mari's sister. He's a modest, unassuming hero, but a hero, nonetheless.

It's very sweet the way he comes upon Mari Asai reading in an all-night Denny's and decides to sit down with her and start talking. He's drawn to her right away it seems, even before remembering that he was once on a double-date with her and her older sister Eri. It was Takahashi's friend who was dating Eri and Takahashi was just dragged along, as was Mari, who stayed in the hotel pool where the date took place practically the entire time, hardly saying a word to Takahashi, just swimming back and forth, back and forth like a sleek young porpoise! He doesn't say it with any anger or bitterness or self-pity or anything. That's why you've got to like the guy. He doesn't seem to take offense and he remembers thinking that Mari was cute at the time, even though it's her sister who is the beautiful one, literally magazine-model beautiful, and who usually gets all the attention.

And it's actually Eri who's the most obvious damsel-in-distress; she's in the most immediate danger, even though she's not really much of a character in "After Dark," not the heroine at all. In fact, she's asleep through practically the entire novel. And not just because it's night time. It seems she's been asleep for the last two months, unable to face the world for secret reasons no one knows. Although she seems to wake up briefly—and conveniently—to nibble enough food and sip enough water to stay alive and continue looking beautiful and not like a skeletal concentration camp victim or a terminal cancer patient with bedsores. And, also, conveniently, to use the bathroom. Otherwise she wouldn't make a very fetching "Sleeping Beauty" or "Snow White."

There are many scenes interspersed throughout the novel of Eri sleeping, which are, I have to admit, not very enjoyable to me, really tedious, in fact; they are narrated in this super-objective tone, like something out of a Robbe-Grillet novel. We are an impersonal observer, we're informed by an impersonal narrative voice, all we can do is watch, like the eye in a camera. We can't wake Eri; no one can. So the details of her room, of Eri herself are gone over with obsessive attention, with the proverbial fine-toothed comb. How beautiful she is, how perfectly formed, etc etc.

I guess its supposed to gives us a voyeuristic erotic thrill on some level, which is ultimately why you couldn't have her really in a coma pooping herself into a diaper (unless you were a real pervert!). But I don't know, Haruki. It just seems a very typical sort of "male" thing, this lingering over a woman's unconscious body, creepy, too, but I guess boys will be boys, even sensitive otherwise heroic boys like you (and Takahashi) and probably even my husband. I suppose you'd say these scenes were intended to build suspense and mystery and surreality. But I suspect they probably just turned you on at some level, and turn-on a great deal of your male readers. But they really don't do anything for me(sigh).

I feel pretty much the same way about the scenes in the "love-hotel," which is another term for "hot-sheets hotel," as we call them here in America. It's a place for illicit affairs and where hookers take their clients. Mari finds herself there for a while trying to talk to a young Chinese prostitute who's been beaten bloody by her client for the evening, a typical Japanese company man. I should have said already that Mari studies Chinese in school; she wants to be a translator when she graduates.

Anyway, these scenes are ostensibly meant as a means to introduce Mari to the dark netherworld of "after dark," the side of life she is ordinarily protected from behind the white picket fences of her upper-middle class suburban lifestyle. Okay, fair enough. But they also seem a way to provide some "cheap thrills" and the tendency of these motifs to "pop up" all the time in even otherwise serious literature written by men is one of the reasons I tend not to enjoy reading male authors as much as women authors.

I guess it's a hormonal thing with you guys, not something that can be helped, like your spontaneous erections and your need to scratch and rub "down there," for instance, or the way you immediately stop channel surfing whenever an underclad woman appears on the tv screen, or to forward each other emails with photos of women with boobs the size of overstuffed knapsacks, no matter how deformed-looking or gross these appendages are hanging. So I try to cut you some slack, but it's true, I'm reading through these scenes with eyes a-rolling.

Anyway, I have to say, when all is said and done, and as dawn approaches here in Brooklyn, New York, and it's time to get up and make my hubby his sausage-egg-and-cheese scramble or to first take care of his own "beastly" urges (I have been told enthusiastically by quite a number of men that I'm a very skillful little blowjob, the best they ever had, though men will typically say that to any girl in that situation, even long after that situation, in the hopes of soon getting in that situation again, so how can you know for sure. I tend to believe them, though: 1. because I want to. 2. because I really do like it that way. See I can play to the audience, too!) The point is that I'm no prude Haruki Murakami, which some of my above criticisms of your book may have led you to conclude. Far from it. Misleading as these caveats may be, I want to tell you that, on the whole, I actually enjoyed "After Dark" very much.

At the end, which I won't give away just in case anyone is reading this (and who would be reading this, pray tell, I can't imagine; certainly not you, Haruki Murakami, that is almost for certain! No one will read this unless it's a guy googling the word "blowjob" who gets directed here by accident but he'll have given up long before now)...anyway, at the end of the novel, I was literally reading through tears in my eyes. I'm talking here about the final scene at the railway station between Takahashi and Mari, not the faintly lesbianic concluding scenes with Mari and Eri in bed together, where my eyes were rolling again, but this time just a little bit.

Well, what can I say? In the end you had my eyes tearing up and rolling in quick succession, Haruki Murakami—but this is the important part, you had them reading through it all.

Good morning (which is probably good night to you in Japan) & best wishes from your friend, m(not quite mari but almost)eeah.

PS. I hope you win that Nobel Prize. Nice guys should finish first once in a while, even ones I just imagine are probably nice.

Haruki Murakami's After Dark takes place over the course of seven hours during an autumn night in Tokyo. From midnight to dawn we follow five lost souls: Eri Asai, a woman in a quasi-comatose state; Takahashi, a jazz musician at an all-night practice session; a prostitute assaulted at a "love hotel"; Shirakawa, a salary man working late on a software project; and Mari Asai a 19-year-old girl looking to escape from the tension of her strained home life. Before the sun rises, each of these stories will intersect with the others.
In this novel Murakami depicts the isolation and loneliness of modern Japanese life. "After Dark" also focuses on the theme of Japanese youth struggling to reconcile their ideals with the stifling conformity of the surrounding culture. There is a peculiar, surrealistic tone in Murakami's fiction. We remember "Kafka on the Shore" with the fish falling from the sky, a man who could converse with cats, and various other strange events. "After Dark" evokes a similar dream world ambiance. People disappear into television sets, or find that their image remains in the bathroom mirror even after they have left the room. A little disturbing at times...

After Dark gathers narrative logic as it goes: random events coalesce into contingencies, contingencies shape characters, characters search for selves beyond the contingent and random world they find themselves in. Heartbreaking in the simplicity of its language, After Dark is composed of vast stretches of dialog. Within those stretches we come to understand the courage, vulnerability, and transformative power of human speech. Intentional, social, and dynamic, "talking," in Murakami's masterful depiction, simultaneously shapes both individual and social self into a mysterious and fragile unity. All else is media noise: violently manipulative, comically disembodied, tragically false. Ultimately, Murakami imagines a world in which conversation is the truest form of compassion and compassion overcomes the alienation of contemporary life. Part fairy tale, part cautionary allegory, After Dark looks beyond (or into) the conventional wisdom of urban anonymity and finds human goodness, one conversation at a time

I find myself thinking about Murakami's books long after I've read them. Murakami compares writing to jazz music and with his writing it is true. Just as I find myself humming memorable bits from songs like Take Five, I also come back again and again to passages of Murakami's novels and short stories. I don't always recognize the deeper meaning in his works right away, but like a piece of music his writing continues to work on me over time.

After Dark takes place in Tokyo between the "witching" hours of midnight and dawn. The nighttime setting lends itself to the loneliness and alienation of the characters. We are never drawn too close to these characters, but instead we watch and listen, along with the narrator, as though through a camera as it zooms in or out and then pans around at times giving us mere glimpses of the wider setting. The story is told in scenes of dialogue between six characters within segments of sequential time. Mari is a 19 year old university freshman who perceives herself as plain and dull, especially compared to her beautiful older sister Eri. Mari has for some reason, known only to her, decided to stay up all night reading at a Denny's. She is joined several times throughout the night by Tetsuya, a young jazz musician. Mari is unexpectedly drawn into the lives of a large female ex-wrestler who now manages a "love hotel," a Chinese prostitute, and two women with mysterious backgrounds who hide under cover of night and transient jobs.

These scenes are interrupted occasionally as we, the camera, look in on Mari's older sister Eri who sleeps. Her sleep is reminiscent of that deep and complete slumber of Sleeping Beauty. Several months previous to the night our story takes place, Eri announces to her family that she is "going to sleep for awhile"; she has not woken since. On this particular night she is watched by something or someone menacing. Eri has withdrawn completely and may or may not find her way back. We are not sure if she is being controlled by the menacing presence or if her continued slumber is by choice. The scenes with Eri are eerie and unexplained.

Much in this short novel is left unexplained. In one of the more magical scenes, an image of a man wavers, his outline bends, quality fades, static rises. Murakami's story is very much like the image of this man. We can't always see clearly what it is that the author is showing us. I don't think this is an accident or poor writing. I believe Murakami does this intentionally and the reader must look for meaning in a less cognitive way. As the author says through his character Tetsuya:

"You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener's body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It's giving birth to that kind of shared state."

Murakami's works are very much a shared state. Not everyone will find his writing to their liking, but those who can resonate with the author will find themselves coming back for more.

In a suburban home in Japan, Eri Asai, a young model and college student, is sleeping --- and has been doing so for two months. We watch her sleep peacefully, yet inexplicably, in an almost empty room in her parents' house.

Strange things then begin to happen: an unplugged television comes on and the screen shows a solitary man in a bare room with a clear mask over his face. He seems to be watching Eri as she sleeps. Can he really see her? Is she dreaming about him? And what are we to think when she disappears from her bedroom and is trapped in the room on the TV screen?

As we ponder this puzzle, so too does Eri's younger sister. Unable to sleep, Mari has fled the house to seek solitude in the night of the city. What she finds is violence and compassion, art and work. Her journey --- which brings her into contact with city dwellers who are awake while most people are asleep --- may provide her with both rest and peace.

AFTER DARK, the latest novel from Haruki Murakami, is stylistically similar to his other many notable works (KAFKA ON THE SHORE, THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE) --- a sort of Japanese magical realism and lyricism verging on surrealism or fantasy.

During her night in the city, Mari first meets Tetsuya Takahashi, a young musician who claims to have met her before when they were brought together on a double date with Mari's sister and Takahashi's friend. Mari and Takahashi subtly flirt over coffee until he heads off to late-night band practice, leaving her alone in the restaurant again. But soon after his departure, a woman named Kaoru comes in looking for Mari. Kaoru runs a "love hotel," where a Chinese prostitute has just been beaten and robbed but speaks no Japanese. She calls Takahashi for help, and he tells her he just left Mari who, coincidentally, speaks Chinese. With this, Mari is drawn into the world of the hotel and the lives of the people who work and stay there.

While Mari moves through the night, we follow her and also return back to her house to watch Eri in her sleep. As the story unfolds, we are left to unravel the connection between the individual who beat the prostitute and Eri. Is he the man in the bare room? By the end of this short novel, Mari is safely back home and has plans to leave Japan to study in China --- but her sister is still in a deep sleep. Mari is undeniably altered, learning about herself and her city and finding a new love for the sister from whom she has felt emotionally estranged for so long.

AFTER DARK is delicate and engaging, despite some scenes that would seem right at home in a David Lynch film. It is a mysterious and odd novel about boundaries, both physical and emotional, and daring to cross them. Think of this as an elegant Japanese version of the 1985 Martin Scorsese film After Hours, in which Griffin Dunne found himself woefully out of his comfort zone when he stayed up all night in Soho meeting a cast of strange and sometimes scary characters. Feeling odd, sad and lonely, Mari also navigates the night in a seedy unfamiliar neighborhood populated by interesting individuals.

AFTER DARK is another compelling and weird story from one of Japan's most original writers. Though not a typical beach read, it definitely should be on your summer reading list.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

If you haven't read any Murakami, then don't start with this one. It read like it was for script for a movie rather than a novel. Yet, it was more of a novella than a novel where it describes what happens late at night before the sun comes back up. It's simply about a short slice of life of two people that don't even meet. Most of his work is quite long and very good, but this one was very short and bizarrely unresolved. For those who want to start a Murakami novel try "Kafka on the Shore" (615 pages) or "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" (604 pages).

After hearing about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I had been wanting to read Murakami, and came across After Dark in a thrift store. Since it was one of his lower reviewed books on the store I didn't know what to expect, but I was very pleased. Murakami is for the most part easy to read, and the language, even though it is translated, flows beautifully. A good portion of the book is dialogue (very good dialogue) and gives a great insight into a culture I hardly understand. The novel is a quick read, it's full of loose ends and symbolism, and it remains intense throughout. The intensity ranges from quiet to screaming, but it's always there. And the scenes that involve the main characters sleeping sister are a delight, and even have elements of magical realism.
If this is supposed to be one of Murakami's weakest efforts, I can't wait to read his other books, because After Dark was very enjoyable. Just start reading. You will be hooked.

The city is unnamed but let's call it Tokyo. It's a couple minutes to midnight in an entertainment district. Mari Asai sits in a crowded second-floor Denny's restaurant, reading a thick book with great intensity and sipping a single cup of coffee. A tall, skinny young man comes in carrying a trombone, sees Mari, and realizes he's met her before so he sits at her table. He tells her how he got into jazz, recounts his memories of her beautiful sister, Eri, and eats his chicken salad. And then he leaves to practice with his band.

Then we're in Eri's bedroom where she's deeply asleep, unaware that her unplugged television is coming to life. The only photos in her room are of herself. After that, we're with Mari again as she goes with Kaoru to a nearby love hotel where a young Chinese prostitute has been beaten by her john and left naked. Mari, who is more or less fluent in conversational Mandarin, acts as interpreter so Karou, the manager, can get the hooker cleaned up and back in the hands of her pimps. And she rides off on the back of a Honda.

Back in Eri's room (she's still sound asleep), the TV is now displaying the image of an exhausted-looking, dust-covered mystery man in a brown suit and a translucent mask. Who is he? How can he appear on a nonfunctioning TV set? No idea. But he seems to be looking out at Eri, in her bed. It's after one o'clock now.

Mari and Kaoru have gone to a small bar for a drink (beer for Kaoru, Perrier for Mari, who says she "can't drink"). We find out a bit more about Mari's present life and plans for the future, and what it's like to grow up with an older sister who's drop-dead gorgeous.

. . . And the story progresses this way, chapter by chapter, with bits of unexpected dry humor dropped in here and there, as we follow the characters (one never-sleeping, one never-waking) in their journey toward dawn. At first, it all reads rather like a series of experimental writing exercises, the sort of thing where the teacher supplies an opening sentence or two and tells the class of would-be novelists to take it from there. (I've done those.) But you should persevere because as you get farther into it, the narrative begins bending time and space in an interesting and meditative way, dipping into metaphysics and questions of agency and causality. And there's not really an ending in the Western wrapping-it-all-up sense. It's not a long book, a little less than 200 pages, but not a word is wasted, and you're going to find yourself stopping at intervals and marking your place with your finger while you think about what you've just read. Murakami is not for everyone (not even in Japan, I gather), but he's worth the effort.

After Dark, by Haruki Murakami (a new to me author) provided for me, what I would have to call a surreal reading experience.

Totally bizarre, but addictive, I listened to this audio book for the last 5 evenings, well into the night. The reader, Janet Song, was amazing, and did an excellent job describing what the reader was seeing as the story unfolded in what I would have to describe as a "book without a plot".

Curious....well the story starts out pretty much at a Denny's in Tokyo, and the entire story takes place in one night, beginning at just minutes before midnight. It is here at Dennys that we meet Mari Asi, an insomniac who seems to never sleep, and Takahashi a trombone player, and an old aquaintance. The two strike up a conversation about whether to order chicken at this restaurant. Mari seems to spend her nights at Denny's with a large book she carries around. Mari and Takahashi continue to meet at night and they become friends. It is through some profound conversations by the two, that we learn more about the other characters. There is Mari's sister Eri, who seems to do nothing but sleep as she suffers from some sort of social withdrawal, along with (2) other equally troubled souls, who have a story to tell: a prostitute and a software manager. Though the course of this story these people will find their lives intersecting.

This story is so different, so strange, yet so vivid, descriptive and haunting. I am really at a loss for what else to say about this unique book, except that although this is my first book by this author, it will not be my last. I plan to explore more books by this author, as I get the feeling I could be on to something new and pretty great with this author.

Although the audio book was excellent, in the future I plan to read the print version by this author if possible, as there were parts I would have wanted to reread and ponder (not so easy with a audio book). RECOMMENDED.

The reason I read this book was because of previous reviews and how After Dark was being portrayed as an innovative novel that is able to incorporate music into the story to act almost as a built in soundtrack for the novel. Since this is something I've been doing in my own writing, I wanted to see how it was handled by Mr. Murakami.

After Dark is the story of two sisters Mari and Eri Asai and their activities as they travel through one night of their lives. We are guided through the novel by the omniscient voice of the author or is it the director of a movie? Because the book flows like a movie. Mari's story starts out a Denny's where she's planning on staying for the night, studying, but she is interrupted by a friend of her sister's who recognizes her. This interruption leads to Mari finding life in the night. Eri's story is more sedate, more like the telling of a fable, Sleeping Beauty to be exact. She announces one night to her family that's she's tired and is going to sleep for a while and that's where we find her, asleep. But it is not sleep without dreaming or is it something more? Is she being watched over by some unseen person? This is the central juxtaposition of the novel while one sleeps in beauty, one witnesses the raw truths of the night in the neon wilderness. While the narrator may seem to focus on the bathetic, the ordinary aspects of life, the perspective isn't ordinary. The telling of the tale isn`t ordinary, it has a dreamlike quality that holds your interest throughout the book, it is novel.

As for the experimental aspects of providing a soundtrack for the novel, it was nothing more than the third person narrator mentioning a song playing in the background at the Denny's or on the street, or in a bar. This doesn't seem any more innovative than what other writers have been doing using pop culture references like mentioning songs, or even trying to give their readers a feel for the music through humming in the background or playing on a jukebox. This is an interesting experiment in writing and there is a subtle complexity, but the writing appears effortless and allows the reader to drift along with the flow of the story.

If you've read Murakami's "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle", you know you're in the presence of a genius who just needs to get himself under control sometimes. He can juggle a million interesting objects at once -- hammers, torches, scarves, chainsaws, other jugglers -- but sometimes he just gets bored, and while the audience is staring up, jaws agape, he lets all those colorful objects drop and walks off to have a sandwich. That's "Wind-Up Bird" in a nutshell. Yet I still think most people would really enjoy it, despite its suffering from attention deficit disorder.

"After Dark" isn't like that, in no small part because it spans a single night; I like to think of this as a Murakami setting for himself what the economists call a precommitment strategy: he knows that he can run off the rails if he's not careful, so he sets up a story to keep himself in check.

And what a fun story it is. We meet a charming musician named Takahashi as he ambles into a Denny's, late one night, and intrudes on a quiet, studious girl named Mari Asai who's poring over her books. As it turns out, Takahashi knows Mari's sister Eri, who is at least some kind of astonishing looker and probably something more like a model. She's the kind of girl whom Takahashi would go out of his way to talk to, if she would only give him the time of day. When Mari veers into his orbit, and Takahashi realizes who she is, he has no choice but to ask about her gorgeous sister.

What we, the readers, know about Eri is that she is asleep in the alternate chapters. We jump back and forth between the Takahashi-and-Mari thread and the camera-focused-on-a-sleeping-Eri thread. And I say "camera" literally: we're watching her through a television, the camera end of which is inside Eri's bedroom. Only, not really her bedroom; more like Eri on a bed in an otherwise empty room. Is it a jail cell? What is this strange room with the camera?

While she sleeps, craziness ensues in Mari's world. Takahashi spends long enough with Mari to know a) that she speaks Chinese, and b) that she'll be studying in that Denny's all night. He steps out to practice with his band, and while he's out he runs into a friend of his who runs a pay-by-the-hour hotel frequented by prostitutes and their johns -- a "love hotel," as they call it. Turns out there's -- surprise surprise -- a Chinese prostitute in there, badly beaten and scared, and no one knows how to talk to her. Takahashi knows just the translator. He sends the hotel's manager into Denny's to pick up Mari, who gladly comes along to help. She was bored in the diner anyway.

In one world we have the beautiful sister, asleep in a strange room. In the other we have the bookish sister translating for a bruised prostitute. The story has one toe in a beautiful world, one toe in the filth. At times those worlds collide, or at least pass each other on the street with a curt nod. Laying on the seam between the two worlds is a cell phone that literally passes messages between them; it's a very clever trick that can only make the reader smile. (This reader, anyway.)

At just over 200 fairly-large-print pages, with rapid-fire dialogue between charming or menacing characters, you'll finish "After Dark" within a couple hours. Murakami sometimes writes candy, but it's intensely nourishing candy. (In this I liken it to early Beatles albums.) It may be tempting to avoid Murakami, but it's even more tempting to read him.

Haruki Murakami is well known for his fiction, often mixing reality and the surreal. After Dark’s many different scenes and characters, can cause confusion if you dive in too quickly. Murakami starts the book with us watching the protagonist, Mari Asai, describing the scene as if we were there, watching her. We learn a lot then, including about her sister Eri Asai, who spends the entire book sleeping.
Throughout the book, Murakami negated the surreal except around Eri, where he used her television to display a room with only a man in it. Murakami’s jumps us through a multitude of scenes, making it difficult to follow the order of the book. By the end I was still left wondering about many people what happened to Eri, Korogi, Takahashi, and Mari, etc? Well, we never know. The whole book goes by too fast, and I couldn’t come up with what the book’s message was supposed to be. However, after I had read After Dark, I found that my displeasure with the end was not unusual, as Murakami is known for his open-ended books. Though it clarifies the book some, my opinion doesn’t change. It’s not a book I would recommend.

I am a big fan of Murakami's writing, which I read in English and Spanish. (Perhaps if I ever learn Japanese, I will read it in the original.) So it's obvious that I would love this, right? I guess I would say of "After Dark" that it is not perfect, but it was what I hoped for. It has a few problems: it is shorter and could have been longer; it is simply written(or translated?) and could have had greater complexity; it has an ending that will not satisfy every reader(I liked it; a friend I lent it to did not). It has great strengths: it feels contemporary, new and fresh, mixing both east and west and east and further east; the magically real elements are perfectly executed and thrilling; and the entire story fits into a compact period of time and its multiple arcs intersect in ways unexpected. In short, brilliant, but short. I wanted it to go on and on.

This is, I think, a perfect book to introduce Murakami to new readers. It is a quick and enjoyable read; it reflects, more or less, his style, themes, and elements. Importantly, this is the least explicitly sexual Murakami novel. I would feel comfortable sharing it with friends, and with younger readers(teenagers) whereas I would feel prudishly embarassed to share something like "Sputnik Sweetheart" or "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle."

This is a hauntingly beautiful yet dark little novel that I devoured in one reading session. This is my first Murakami novel but it will not be my last. His writing is sparse and visceral and everything I was hoping it to be. If I had to sum this book up in one word it would be ... thought-provoking.

In the span of a few dark hours, chance encounters give rise to many questions about humanity. Who are we and why? What would have happened had we made certain choices differently? Too many questions to know all the answers, as if the answers really matter.

If you have never read Murakami but have always meant to, this is a great place to start. This book encompasses all that makes him a marvel. It's a distillation of all of the beauty and reverie and subtle darkness that makes his writing so, well, enigmatic and thought provoking. Give it a try. You will not be sorry.

What do Denny's, a Chinese-speaking night owl student, her sleeping sister, a Love Hotel, a violent businessman, a trombonist, a female former wrestler, and a prostitute have in common? They all play a part in Murakami's (as usual) strange novel, which takes place during one night in Tokyo between midnight and dawn. The Chinese-speaking Japanese girl (Mari) meets a trombonist (Tetsuya) when he asks to share her table at a Denny's restaurant. He departs. She is later summoned by a stranger to help translate for an injured person, at which point she meets several unusual characters. Alternating between the activities of Mari--primarily her interactions with the trombonist, who befriends her but pines over her sister, and staff members of the love hotel; and the slightly changing strange state of the slumber chamber of her beautiful sister Eri, the story seems to focus on the relationship between the siblings. Additionally, there is an attempt to track down the perpetrator of a crime. Although the abnormal tends to be the norm in Murakami novels, the "dark" part of After Dark, that involving Eri Asai, is overly obscure. Better: The Upside Down Bird Chronicles and Blind Willow Sleeping Woman.

I read this book after reading Murakami's book about running, which I picked up for three reasons, it combined writing, running, and an author I wanted to read but hadn't yet. So I came to this novel expecting, I guess, something a little more substantial. After all, I'd read many glowing reviews of the author's work, and I liked his straightforward style in 'What I talk about..." This novel reminded me of 'On Chesil Beach' by Mcewan, in that it's so spare it hurts, yet every word is important. Although the difference with this story is that it didn't resolve into anything. I found the story too esoteric to remain with me after I'd finished. The writing is beautiful, and although I've only been to the Tokyo airport, I had the feeling of being in a modern day Japanese city, but ultimately the story itself didn't have the substance to hold up those fragile sentences.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami reminded me of carefully-shuffled cards. Two decks representing two separate (yet ultimately and intimately related) stories are slowly merged, chapter by chapter, until they make one cohesive whole that is far more beautiful and evocative than either story would be if taken alone. Murakami is a master of this technique, and he is in fine form here.

Story one: It is midnight in downtown Tokyo. An introverted, bookish, somewhat cynical young woman drinks coffee and reads in an all-night diner, escaping into her book, retreating from the world, hiding from phantoms. She encounters several quirky and unexpected other late-night souls and has conversations and adventures, forming serendipitous attachments and revealing more about herself as the story progresses.

Story two: A beautiful young woman sleeps...and sleeps...and sleeps, still as stone in her bed. A quiet (David) Lynchian drama unfolds which may be literal or metaphor, dream, hallucination, or reality, or a bit of each. Any details I could give might spoil the story for potential readers, so I'll simply say it is subtly surreal, atmospheric, and rich in symbolism.

I mentioned David Lynch, and although he is a bit more in-your-face than Murakami, I feel the points of comparison are strong. There is a magical realist air all through the book, where the mundane takes stranger and less expected turns as the story progresses. This is not a work of horror fiction, yet there are several instances of imagery that would be right at home in one of the finer, more understated Japanese horror films. This book felt very cinematic to me, and I can very much see it being adapted for the screen by one of Japan's avant-garde and visionary auteurs. (I'd suggest Katsuhito Ishii, or perhaps Takashi Miike in one of his thoughtful, introspective phases.)

Murakami has created a lovely, unusual book full of surprises, wry humor, gorgeous prose, artful dialogue, poetic metaphor, and cinema-worthy scene-building. Read this if you love the author or Japanese literature in general, multi-layered meaning that will keep you thinking and re-evaluating long after you've finished reading, deftness of language, colorful and theater-quality casts of characters, or plots that coil labyrinth-like back and around and onto and into themselves. Read this if you are looking for the perfect book to escape into over coffee, in an all-night diner, after dark.

This the first time I read anything of Haruki Murakami and what a treat. This is not your usual fiction work, nor is it quite of the absurd beautifully yet frustrating style of Kazuo Ishiguro. Like Ishiguro, Murakami seduces the reader with very real and very vivid description of people and events; so we are there completely witnessing events and picturing very real people and places in front of us. His portrayal of all is sympathetic, not too judgmental at all. The move from a normal novel like style to some sort of a camera or a documentary filming works beautifully in just reminding us not to expect answers or a closure. It feels like a "do it yourself" novel, the basic characters are laid out for us, some interesting threads for multiple plots are started, then it is really up to the reader to develop further and finish. The possibilities are endless, I finished the book three days ago and I can't stop developing ideas for it.

For people who know and love Japan, they will appreciate the subtleties of the description of the restaurants or the way food is served. The music and the Jazz add to the ambiance. Enjoy!

After reading through some of the reviews, i think it would be safe to advise people that if they like stories that are concrete, explained, & make sense, they maybe shouldn't read After Dark. Any plot is very loose, & there are parts that some may feel are pointless.

Personally, i liked this book quite a lot, maybe in part because of its strangeness. Not everything is resolved; some things are simply introduced or hinted at. Things aren't tied up in a neat little bow; not everything makes perfect sense. But instead of being agitated by this kind of experimental style, i found it engaging & interesting, & it draws a closer parallel to life. After Dark seems more like a time frame-- starting from 11:56 PM & moving on from there-- & watching people pass through it. The reader finds out some things about them, but not everything about everyone is given away, & the reader parts ways with the characters without knowing where things will take them. It's more like a long observation that's allowed to follow people throughout the night; there is no big climax at the end.

Some people, it seems, also feel that the parts with Eri are pointless, maybe in large part because they are so strange & nebulous & there is no explanation, ultimately, for what takes place with her. Regardless, i would say they still have their place in the story & lend to its late night kind of atmosphere; to remove them would hurt the overall story considerably.

Overall, as the first book of Murakami's that i have read, i can say that i'm not disappointed. I really liked After Dark, but i would caution those who like more "normal" books.

Books don't come with sound tracks, but if they did, there's no doubt that trombonist Curtis Fuller's breathy opening notes in "Five Spot After Dark" would be the perfect entree to Haruki Murakami's AFTER DARK. Low-key piano, soft drums and high hat played almost entirely with brushes, and a haunting solo trombone create the perfect noir accompaniment for Murakami's seven-hour, overnight jaunt through a Tokyo of lost and lonely souls. It is a Tokyo that seems about as un-Japanese as anyone could possibly make it - with a small leap of the reader's imagination, this story could have taken place just as easily in New York, London, Paris, or any other large, modern city.

The story line of AFTER DARK hardly seems important. Suffice to say that the author introduces a small cast of characters who suffer the loneliness of urban nighttime existence and yet manage to interact witth and rely upon one another in unpredictable ways. There's Tetsuya Takahashi, the trombone-playing band member out for the last time for an all-night practice session with his band before hoping to return to school to study law. Then there's Mari Asai (an anagram for Asia?), also a college-age student of Chinese language with her textbook in an all-night Denny's, sitting quietly alone until joined by Takahashi. And there's Kaoru, former professional wrestler and now part of the clean-up crew at a seedy love hotel named Alphaville. And Guo Dongli, a Chinese prostitute who gets beaten up in the Alphaville and is assisted by Kaoru with Mari acting as translator. And another night bird, the programmer Shirakawa, who toils away fixing his company's software in an otherwise empty office and who also happens to be Guo Dongli's assailant. Finally, there's Eri Asai, Mari's stunningly beautiful older sister who has been asleep, but not in a coma, for two months.

Chapters of AFTER DARK that follow the night's events (each is labeled by the hour and minute at which it begins) are interspersed with Twilight Zonish scenes of Eri Asai asleep in her room. We watch her as though we are a camera slowly panning the room, reducing us in Murakami's parlance to a mere point of view. Eri's TV mysteriously turns itself on, gradually revealing another watcher, the Man with No Face. Over the course of the night, Eri is magically pulled into the room inside the television and then released, but not before revealing an inexplicable connection to the prostitute-beating programmer Shirakawa and finally offering a sense of resolution between the estranged sisters Mari and Eri.

In a book riddled with weird events and odd connections, a major clue has to come from the love hotel, Alphaville. Jean-Luc Godards 1965 film of the same name was an avant garde masterpiece, a work of futruristic science fiction shot without special effects in the back streets of Paris. In Godard's future, Alphaville is run with ruthlessly efficient logic by a massive Alpha 60 computer. Pictures of the machine's inventor, Vonbraun, are everywhere - he is the new god of Alphaville, to the extent there can be one. In Godard's futuristic city, there is no place for emotion (a man who cries over his wife's death is eliminated), and even love is reduced to its barest mechanics. Language is controlled through "the bible," actually a dictionary of permitted words that is continually revised and simplified. Yet the citizens of Alphaville are supplied to excess with their material needs. Into this fascistic mixture comes an Outsider, Lemmy Caution, and through his eyes, we witness a battle for love, the power of free will, and the triumph of personal conscience.

Perhaps the indirect allusion via Alphaville to the German rocket scientist Werner Von Braun is a clue to Murakami's Man with No Face. That was the name given by Western agencies to the quite real Markus Wolf of the Stasi, the East German secret police, a man who harbored the international terrorist Carlos the Jackal and provided terrorist training to the PLO. Then again, the faceless man in the TV could be a riff on Procul Harem's song, "In the Wee Small Hours of Sixpence." In that song, which takes place among "the remnants of the evening," the faithful but rusty old retainer "may have once been just as we are and now has no face at all." Still as the song declares, his blunted sword is sharp enough, and so may it be with us. Who besides the author can truly say?

Leave it to Mr. Murakami to blend elements of American jazz, French cinema, and American commercialism (Denny's and 7-Eleven) with the peculiar formality and structure of Japanese society. AFTER DARK as a jazzy riff on commercialization, modern technology, alienation, and the loss of souls could be a commentary on Japan or equally on the industrialized West, or the modern technological world in general. Who else but Murakami would have an abandoned cell phone sitting on 7-Eleven shelf, spouting vague threats of "You probably think you got away with it" and "You can run, but you'll never get away" to any hapless shopper who responds to its plaintive rings? And how many of us would react by thinking that the message was indeed intended for us, that the call was not just a random accident of chance? While some readers will no doubt differ in their judgments, I found AFTER DARK to be Murakami at his teasing, infuriating, intellectually subversive best.

This book was my first time reading Haruki Murakami, and now I'm hooked. It's the lovely, haunting, and strange story of a handful of interesting characters during one night. Without giving anything away, I will say that the ending of the book may be unsatisfying to some American readers who are more accustomed to having all loose ends neatly tied up. There are perhaps more questions left unanswered at the end than there are things explained, and I can totally see how that would frustrate some people. Even so, the story is enjoyable, and the scenes are so well painted that I can picture them in eerie detail - I still can't forget the mental images of some of the more haunting scenes.

This is an amazing story that takes place in the course of a single night. You'll meet great characters, stumble upon profound mysteries... And then a new day dawns. This is a novel that will stay with you and haunt your memories occasionally like those of a vivid dream you try remember even as it fades.

We've been led to expect novels to be of great length and deal with major issues. That expectation can result in disappointment because it flies in the face of the definition of a novel.

By Webster's definition, a novel is "a fictitious tale or romance." By further definition, "A fictitious prose narrative, involving some plot of greater or lesser intricacy, and professing to give a picture of real life, generally exhibiting the passions and sentiments in a state of great activity, especially the passion of love. The romance deals with what is heroic, marvelous, mysterious and supernatural, while the novel professes to relate only what is credible."

Those latter standards of what constitutes a romance and a novel are no longer exact since writers have been experimenting and expanding the concept of both over a long period of time. But, no where is the novel defined as of a particular length. The divisions of novella, novelette, etc., are purely arbitrary and of no real consequence.

By the definition quoted above, "After Dark" falls into the category of romance and it combines all the usual elements of Murakami's style--fusing the realistic with the fantastic, allusions to the influence of the West on modern Japanese life, nostalgia and an odd streak of humor.

It takes us to a world unknown to those who live and work during the day. Mari, a naïve young girl of some education but with a distinct lack of self-confidence, has come into the city at night in response to questions that trouble her. At the root of her search appears to be guilt over the plight of an elder sister afflicted with hikikomori, a Japanese term for those young people who choose to withdraw from society, and has drifted into somnolence.

Sitting and reading in a Denny's, Mari encounters Takahashi, another alienated young man, who claims they've met before through her sister. This leads to encounters with a number of other people whose lives are alien to her own. In an engaging cinematic style, Murakami directs us through the night and a wide range of emotions that will haunt the reader long after the final chapter is read.

To say that a novel must be a book of 300-plus pages would leave out "Wuthering Heights," "Of Mice and Men" and "Cannery Row," "The Old Man and the Sea," the best of Mark Twain, most of Simenon, to name a few favorites. I enjoy a long novel as much as the next person. Still, I believe a novel should be just as long as it takes to tell the story involved and not a word longer or shorter.

What a weird, beguiling little book. You just sort of float around while this Altman-esque point of view shifts back and forth between a little ensemble of strange, endeeringly damaged people. Murakami's narration is what really makes this work so well, the voice he uses is almost mesmerizing at times. The whole thing is just suffused with this jazzy, hypnotic stlye that occasionally veers into something darker, something more primevally resonant. If William Gibson and David Lynch wrote a book together while listening to Kind of Blue, they would probably have come up with something like this. What does happen out there in the world after dark? What indeed.

What Murakami does with his razor-sharp stories and language puts his English-speaking contemporaries to shame. Without wasting a single syllable, Murakami embroiders the revelatory moments of youth with threads of sexuality, consumerism, and modern mysticism.

In chronicling an "all nighter" in the separate but interrelated lives of five characters, Murakami really pushes the boundaries of modern storytelling. Whereas so many other authors labor to tell such an intricate, oblique tale, Murakami remains effortless. A joy to read.

In Jay Rubin's biography, Murakami describes his style: "First of all, I never put more meaning into a sentence than is absolutely necessary. Second, the sentences have to have rhythm...To maintain the rhythm, there must be no extra weight." His latest novel, After Dark, embodies that style in lean, clear prose.

The story takes place between 11:56 one evening and 6:52 the next morning. In those few hours and with 5 or 6 key characters, the author explores the solace of sleep, memory as fuel and man's emergence from the prison of the dark. Murakami demonstrates the fragile nature of the human condition, the prison of personal beauty and the immense gulf that exists between individuals.

What I most appreciate is his ability to present the unreal in such a visual manner. Like Kafka, Murakami leads you incrementally to a strange and unconnected place.

After Dark is quick but rewarding. I prefer earlier Murakami efforts but this new entry is shorter than his recent work and achieves the nearly weightless rhythm towards which the author strives.

I have to admit that I love a book with a good ending that ties up all loose endings, so I might not be the best person to review Murakami books as he often ends with many questions lingering... but I will try to put my bias aside for the sake of other readers. I think that this book was rushed and the story wasn't well constructed. He seemed to randomly insert supernatural occurrences for fun, and they didn't really add to the book.

I loved the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and would recommend it across the board (with a warning to not expect everything to be explained). After Dark was not so great. I did find the characters compelling and the scenes were once again very vivid and interesting, but there wasn't much of a story and I felt that it was too short -I think he could've expanded on the world he created in this novel because I loved that it all took place in the middle of the night in such a vibrant city as Tokyo. Read the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle instead.

My dad recommended this to me, and the blurb of the book sounded interesting. Dad said I could possibly read it in one sitting, but with work, and life revolving around me, I find it impossible to do that these days. When I was younger, sure.

What I thought was kinda interesting/weird about After Dark, is that it reads very much like a film. The start of each chapter (a different time in the seven hours that the book is based in) sets up the location, and the people in it, and the surroundings. Very much like a film/screenplay would. I found it a very strange way of reading.

I never really feel like I got to know the characters, the book was that short. Intentionally short, it has been described more of a novella, than of a novel. But intentionally short, that the characters slip away once you have finished reading? It's not a book I managed to lose myself in - it took me a couple of days to read, but it was in short spurts, on the bus, at lunch etc. There's nothing particularly memorable about the book, for me, just the style of writing.

Yes, it may be short and sweet (like myself), but for me, it was the easy relief between two in-depth books (The Mystery Of Mr Y and The Book Thief, which is up next.)

First of all, let me say, that I have very much enjoyed the book. However,
just like many other readers I have a hard time explaining what the story is
all about. It has, certainly, very moody character, but leaves so many loose
ends, that it does make one wander if author wrote it as, perhaps, an exercise.
An exercise in a particular screen play like writing style, which would be
another sticky point for some, although quite attractive and appropriate, in
that it seem to help to create the mood of Tokyo after dark. Still, it would
make much more sense for everyone if story was more developed and certainly
Murakami other works show that he is capable of producing complete store, may
be even overwritten, but in this case he clearly took a minimalist approach.

Recommended with reservations.

I've always thought the great thing about reading Murakami's novels is how effectively he makes you feel as if you've been transported into a Salvador Dali painting. Murakami always uses words so effectively to create a real feeling of being at or near the border between reality and something more ethereal.

"After Dark" accomplishes the same thing as Murakami's "Wind Up Bird Chronicle" or "Kafka on the Shore" but not as much so. This doesn't mean this isn't a good novel, or even that it's not good for Murakami, it's just a less intense Murakami experience. The book reads like an extended short story. It is a very quick read and only takes you a little ways into the worlds that Murakami typically explores.

"After Dark" looks into peoples' dual nature, how each of us have lightness and darkness within us to some degree. It accomplishes this exploration by telling the story of a young man and young woman's single night in a Japanese city.

If you've never read Murakami before, this is a great place to start; it won't take much time and if you like it you can invest the time in his bigger novels where you can expect more, deeper and better. If you're already a fan of Murakami, you'll like this , but it'll probably leave you wishing there were more to it.

Great as a Murakami snack, but I definitely recommend his entrees if you've never read them.

This was my introduction to Murakami. With his new novel coming out, Iq84, I wanted a primer on his tone and chose "After Dark" as it was rather short and had an interesting premise and I am so glad I did. I felt like I was reading a movie, especially the chapters revolving around Eri, they were almost creepy with its voyeuristic tone and you could see Murakami's words unfolding into pictures in your mind. I think I have found a new favorite author and can't wait until Iq84 comes out.

I feel as if I just watched a film produced by David Lynch and directed by Darren Aronofsky (Google them). Yes, I said watched not read, because that is what you do with this novel. You experience it.

I'll admit this was the first time one of Murakami's books spooked me. Check it out.

I think this is the most down-to-earth novel by Mr. Murakami that is published now but with a touch of his earliest novels. I admire his recent novels but I also love his previous ones. This one has that mysterious, voyeuristic, supernatural, surrealist feeling of his recent novels but somehow, the depth, the journey of people of his earlier ones. The story evolves in one moment after midnight. Just one night - and it's mesmerizing as always. The dialogs, the encounters, the mystery, seems natural and flowing very nicely. He is truly a master of this kind of novel.

I read a fair amount of translated fiction, and Murakami is one of those writers I feel like I ought to like, but the few times I've tried, just haven't connected with. This latest novella seemed like another chance to check him out without a huge investment of time. The last book of his I read was his collection of short stories After the Quake, which were unified by common themes of alienation and loneliness. Those themes are dominant in this brief story as well.

Set in night-time Tokyo, the book often feels much more like a script for a moody film than it does a work of fiction. Many passages adopt a first-person omniscient voice, written in the style of a script, directing the camera and describing what it/we see. After a while this gets annoying, and made me wish that Murakami had just gone ahead and made a film if that's what he wanted to do. The storyline, such as it is, is arranged around the coincidental intersections of people, which calls to mind the structure of recent films such as (Short Cuts, Crash, Magnolia, Babel, Amores Perros, etc.) where we follow characters in and out of each others lives.

These characters include: Mari, a 19-year-old sitting in a diner reading the night away, Takahashi, a 20-something trombone player who recognizes her from high school, Karou, the ex-wrestler manager of a love hotel, a Chinese hooker who's badly beaten at the hotel, Korogi, a mysterious handyman at the hotel, Shirakawa, the nondescript but disturbed salaryman who beat the hooker, the hooker's mysterious motorcycle-riding boss, and finally Mari's model sister Eri, who is stuck in some kind of prolonged Sleeping Beauty-like slumber. The final character is Tokyo itself, which like these nocturnal people, is still awake but somewhat surreal.

Once again, Murakami seems fixated on creating a mood rather than a narrative. One gets a good sense of the characters and the strange ambiance of the night, but it doesn't lead anywhere particularly interesting. Once again, alienation and loneliness are the main themes -- but all these tales of missed connections can only take you so far before you start wanting something more substantial. I suspect, however, that ultimately, Murakami just isn't for me. (Neither, for that matter, is the "other" Murakami, Ryu, whose graphically violent books focus on the same themes, but in a very different manner.)

Thus goes Takahashi's motto in life. In "After Dark", spanning a single night in people's lives, Takahashi and others form a web of stories of people who have their problems and their worries. From Mari, trying to deal with a reality that she can't fathom, to her sister Eri, sleeping herself into a blissful nothingness sheltered from reality, the characters are real and messy. Interwoven through it all is Murakami's unique weaving of reality and the ethereal nothingness that lurks just beneath the surface.

This would have to be one of Murakami's more accessible novels, and one that leaves a somewhat pleasantly disturbing after glow. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel to the very last page. I had intended to read it just while commuting, but I got absorbed into it and had to finish it. It is one of those books, I think.

For people who have not read Murakami before, I think this is the ideal novel to start with. It is not too surreal for people and it is has a depth of perception that is still able to be shared with readers. It is a great book and one that I will be thinking about for some time.

After Dark is very short. It only takes up 250 pages because of the large print size, margins, and spacing. But even that's too long -- the book is still full of filler. Here's an example from the scene where Takahashi discovers an abandoned cell phone, and answers it to find a message from the mob: "'You'll never get away,' a man's voice says instantly. 'You will never get away. No matter how far you run, we're going to get you... We're going to tap you on the shoulder someday. We know what you look like...If somebody taps you on the shoulder somewhere someday, it's us,' the man says." (217) Takahashi subsequently mulls over this message: "Somebody, for some reason, is being chased by a number of people, Takahashi imagines. Judging from the man's declarative tone, that somebody will probably never get away. Sometime, somewhere, when he is least expecting it, someone is going to tap him on the shoulder." (218) Thanks for giving me that play-by-play, I couldn't have done without it.

This goofy, repetitive tone is everywhere. Murakami thinks that the night-time makes ordinary settings mysterious and sexy. Fine, I'm with him all the way on that. But as a result, he adopts a tone of heavy poetic gravitas and piles it on everywhere. The most mundane and trivial descriptions are weighed down with ridiculously serious intonation. "Takahashi...carries only a shopping basket. His hand reaches out, grasps a carton of milk, but he notices that it is low-fat, and he frowns. This could be a fundamental moral problem for him, not just a question of the fat content of milk." (104) Edge of my seat here! "Next he moves on to the fruit case and picks up an apple. This he inspects from several angles beneath the ceiling lights. It is not quite good enough. He puts it back and picks up another apple, subjecting it to the same kind of scrutiny. He repeats the process several times until he can find one that he can at least accept, if not be wholly satisfied with." (104) The best part is the way the description insistently goes deeper and deeper into hilarious, needless pedantry.

The scenes with Eri Asai sleeping in her bed are all entirely unnecessary. Eri does not do anything outside these scenes, she's a total cipher. Other characters talk about her, but that brings out aspects of their own character, it reveals little about her own personality. Yet the book spends considerable time hammering on these drawn-out, grave descriptions of her bedroom, always heavy on the faux-mysterious intonation: "Our point of view...picks up and lingers over things...in the room. We are invisible, anonymous intruders. We look. We listen. We note odors. But we are not physically present in the place... We observe, but do not intervene. Honestly speaking, however, the information regarding Eri Asai that we can glean from the appearance of this room is far from abundant." (33) You don't say. "The sleeping woman appears to be totally unaware of these events occurring in her room. She evidences no response to the outpouring of light and sound from the TV set but goes on sleeping soundly amid an established completeness. For now, nothing can disturb her deep sleep." (35) And on and on it goes.

The more realistic scenes are better, but there too, the tendentious writing provides much merriment: "She reaches out at regular intervals and brings the coffee cup to her mouth, but she doesn't appear to be enjoying the flavour. She drinks because she has a cup of coffee in front of her: that is her role as a customer." (6) It sounds like what you'd write in high school if you wanted to evoke the emptiness of life. And let's not forget Murakami's supremely awkward way of working in a Jean-Luc Godard reference (really, Godard is still hip?) into the dialogue. Mari says, "In Alphaville, you're not allowed to have deep feelings. So there's nothing like love. No contradictions, no irony." Kaoru "wrinkles her brow" and queries, "Irony?" To which Mari readily replies, "Irony means taking an objective or inverted view of oneself or of something belonging to oneself and discovering oddness in that." To which Kaoru replies, "I don't really get it... But tell me: is there sex in this Alphaville place?" (72) No comment.

If you strip away the filler, the core story is promising. It uses a lot of well-traveled Murakami tropes: the cool and collected protagonist, who never allows the girl's rudeness to perturb him; the pretty and successful older sister; the reserved and troubled younger sister; the earthy but friendly, unattractive older woman. These types appear in both Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but that's not really a problem. The world could always use another story about alienated young people whose routine is shaken up by nocturnal mystery and sleaze, enabling them to establish a certain rapport. The scene in the love hotel (which is referred to as a "love ho," possibly in order to sound cool and trendy) early on is pretty good. This would have been a much better book if Murakami tried to flesh out the story of the Chinese prostitute. Or, if that's asking too much, he could have focused more on the main characters' wandering. For instance, he could have shown more of the musicians in the basement. But the world he depicts has no texture, because he spends his time on these inane descriptions instead.

Basically this book is pointless. It would have been better as a short story, but even then it wouldn't be especially memorable. If you're interested in Murakami's take on human connections, read Norwegian Wood; if you prefer his fanciful side, try Hard-Boiled Wonderland. After Dark adds nothing to either of those areas.

Unfortunately this is not one of Murakami's best. Unlike "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and "Wild Sheep Chase" this skirts around the surreal and mysterious leaving this reader wanting a bit more. Seems like he's writing what is supposed to be a Murakami novel, or another author's attempt at one. Similar motifs float through all of his books, and that's generally admirable (akin to flying through space seeing the same planets, but always a different side or detail), but this time it reeks of the exhausted rather than the tried and true. Is it the translation? Really...I don't read Japanese so perhaps there's something untranslatable that would've made this a great novel? For Japanese readers' sake I hope so.

The best books sweep you up into a fully realized world, a world through which the authors communicate some small aspect of their sense of the way our lives flow. We see the tragedy, the comedy, the paradox of human existence. This vision is one I often find in Murakami, and in After Dark, the sense of having communed with a complex and fascinating world view is presented in a breathtakingly condensed and economical form. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a majestic historical canvas, while After Dark is personal and small. Nonetheless, it shows the same tragi-comic vision, an experience that at once threatens to break your heart, while at the same time magically healing it.

I ordered this book from the US because as a UK citizen I stood to get it from my own country a month later and at a 50% price markup. For US translations, this is generally the best policy, especially in the era of the low dollar.

Murakami is often accused (by friends of mine, at least) of going on for ages about the vaguest things with very little happening. For my part, I see little point in this rich and complex whimsy if it can't be fully explained in a natural time span - however Murakami has addressed these criticisms with After Dark, a novel less than 200 pages long and taking course entirely over the span of one night.

Murakami's style has also shifted in parts. There is definitely more of a TV script feel about the whole thing - at moments you can visualise almost Lynchian scenes, albeit with a little less terror. In other scenes he literaly describes camera movements and writes as a director might shout.

As for specifics, we are dealing with the adventures of three central characters, all fairly typical of Murakami - but with far less detail and complication, and most of all far less experience. On the one hand, everybody likes a character who is 'trapped', a character who is 'confused', a character who is 'friendly'. Everybody certainly loves characters who are kooky. But Murakami readers, as far as I know, don't care much for characters who have no great adventures, have no great insights or diseases, and learn nothing. Interesting anecdotes and coincidences occur, but they are of no great consequence (except perhaps in Lynchian logic - but then without severe repercussion).

Overall it creates no great lasting impression, and even though it would seem the author is trying to get out of a rut it is not a book I would recommend for any newcomer to Haruki Murakami. It is still fantastic writing, but still ultimately blissfully free from the concerns of most pulp writers while taking many of their gimmicks. An enjoyable read, but the worst Murakami novel yet translated.

Sure, it's not quite The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore, but it's still a simple, engaging read. I read it mostly on the train, coming home from work late at night, and the novel works well in that setting: it is, as some reviewers have already noted, like a quiet late-night jazz album, like Miles Davis. I agree with the reviewer who said it ought to be read in one sitting, during a long sleepless night.

I can see why some readers could not get into it, but I hope those who've said, "This was my first Murakami book and it will be my last" will give his other works a chance. Starting with this would be like watching Fire Walk With Me when you haven't seen Twin Peaks.

A couple of chapters in, it hit me hard that this almost seems like a script for a play. Most of the descriptions (and there are many)are the exact same kind you would find in a script. To a lesser extent, it could also seem like a movie, but I kept seeing each scene in my head on a stage.
I wasn't a large fan of this, but as this is supposed to be a review and not an opinion piece, I won't carry on about this.
I do, however, believe that all of the desciptors were over-doing it. Making someone 'feel' a story is a large part in making a novel enjoyable, and I'm a huge fan of most every single other Murakami story and his descriptions, but these eventually just felt tedious - particularly in the "Eri" sections of the story. I often found myself speed-reading these sections, before going back and reading them more closely as I could give a more accurate review.

Other than those particular sections, I found it mostly enjoyable. One could really feel the late nite vibe of it, which I'm particularly fond of. I often try and find music that just 'feels midnite-y' and spend a lot of time in the dead hours of cities myself, so I really liked that aspect of it.

The content itself was also interesting, but there are plenty of reviews already going more in to depth in that, and my main point was to mention the script-feel of this.

This was my first novel by Haruki Murakami that I've read and I absolutely loved it. Perhaps it was because I listened to the audiobook rather than read it out off the page that gave me the advantage. The first few moments my hand hovered over the eject button because I didn't think it was going to be something I'd like. I'm glad my hand only hovered. This is definitely a unique book, and not my usual style I prefer but I highly recommend and will now be moving onto my next book by this author.

It's a typical really quiet-young-smart-rich-runaway Mari Asai accidentally get along with a really nag-older-smart-worker Takahashi.

And

It's a typical really quiet-young-smart-rich-runaway Kafka Tamura accidentally get along with a really nag-older-smart-worker Oshima.

Well, that's Haruki Murakami's great formula.

Personally, After Dark is my favorite book from Haruki Murakami. I think that this story is just so suspenseful, it really makes you curious. At first, I had a hard time understanding the plot but after a few chapters, you gain a deep understanding. This book is super quotable and fascinating. I would highly recommend this book. It's been years since I've read it yet the story is still engraved in my head.

Sure, it's not quite The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore, but it's still a simple, engaging read. I read it mostly on the train, coming home from work late at night, and the novel works well in that setting: it is, as some reviewers have already noted, like a quiet late-night jazz album, like Miles Davis. I agree with the reviewer who said it ought to be read in one sitting, during a long sleepless night.

I can see why some readers could not get into it, but I hope those who've said, "This was my first Murakami book and it will be my last" will give his other works a chance. Starting with this would be like watching Fire Walk With Me when you haven't seen Twin Peaks.

A couple of chapters in, it hit me hard that this almost seems like a script for a play. Most of the descriptions (and there are many)are the exact same kind you would find in a script. To a lesser extent, it could also seem like a movie, but I kept seeing each scene in my head on a stage.
I wasn't a large fan of this, but as this is supposed to be a review and not an opinion piece, I won't carry on about this.
I do, however, believe that all of the desciptors were over-doing it. Making someone 'feel' a story is a large part in making a novel enjoyable, and I'm a huge fan of most every single other Murakami story and his descriptions, but these eventually just felt tedious - particularly in the "Eri" sections of the story. I often found myself speed-reading these sections, before going back and reading them more closely as I could give a more accurate review.

Other than those particular sections, I found it mostly enjoyable. One could really feel the late nite vibe of it, which I'm particularly fond of. I often try and find music that just 'feels midnite-y' and spend a lot of time in the dead hours of cities myself, so I really liked that aspect of it.

The content itself was also interesting, but there are plenty of reviews already going more in to depth in that, and my main point was to mention the script-feel of this.

This was my first novel by Haruki Murakami that I've read and I absolutely loved it. Perhaps it was because I listened to the audiobook rather than read it out off the page that gave me the advantage. The first few moments my hand hovered over the eject button because I didn't think it was going to be something I'd like. I'm glad my hand only hovered. This is definitely a unique book, and not my usual style I prefer but I highly recommend and will now be moving onto my next book by this author.

It's a typical really quiet-young-smart-rich-runaway Mari Asai accidentally get along with a really nag-older-smart-worker Takahashi.

And

It's a typical really quiet-young-smart-rich-runaway Kafka Tamura accidentally get along with a really nag-older-smart-worker Oshima.

Well, that's Haruki Murakami's great formula.

Personally, After Dark is my favorite book from Haruki Murakami. I think that this story is just so suspenseful, it really makes you curious. At first, I had a hard time understanding the plot but after a few chapters, you gain a deep understanding. This book is super quotable and fascinating. I would highly recommend this book. It's been years since I've read it yet the story is still engraved in my head.

When I learned that Murakami's last novel, Kafka on the Shore, was to break away from his usual first-person everyman narration style, I was intrigued. Could he be breaking out of his increasingly-formulaic template? Well, kind of, but unfortunately, that was about as far as it went. The novel left a LOT to be desired. Which is why After Dark is such a pleasant surprise--it deviates even further from the norm, but in a way that really works. I don't want to say it's his *best* novel...but, well, it might be. No doubt this means less coming from me--a decided non-member of the Murakami Cult--but the fact remains, it's an elegant little novel. There's little question in my mind that it's his most cohesive and least self-indulgent.

I'm bemused to hear people complaining about the After Dark's brevity. It does what it sets out to do, and it does it well. One can quibble about small details, but adding substantially more would have just rendered the novel sloppy and shapeless. What kind of fan roots for the writer to ruin his own work? Whether it's worth paying hardcover price for a book that you can finish in two hours--well, that's another, more valid, question.

But at any rate, it's a thoughtful, effectively-understated book. Hopefully, this is a sign of things to come for a writer who until recently seemed doomed to write the same fun-but-shallow novel over and over and over.

This is a short book, and here is a short review. The novel is enjoyable to read, and follows several interesting characters with intersecting storylines who are up late at night while everyone else is asleep (and one character who has been sleeping constantly for two months except to eat and go to the bathroom), all because they are running away from something. There is also a bit of magic going on, although I'm not sure how it fits in with the rest of the story, except maybe to set a more otherworldly mood. I liked the wind-up bird chronicle a lot better, but this is not bad.

Murakami's characters are often conversant with either jazz, whisky or both. After Dark is diluted compared to his classics such as The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Lightning can only strike so many times... we should be happy that these works exist. Many of the previous reviewers are correct that this isn't his best work, but still much better reading than 99% of anything one can read. The cinematic style, at once detached yet fully engrossing is fascinating. His ability to capture the intelligence and naevity of youth balanced by the wisdom and folly of age is nothing short of beautiful. As one may acclimate to the nuances of a martini by starting out with a liberal dose of olive juice, this short novel can serve as a initation Murakami's inimitable style. Read up and mix your own metaphors.

"You'll never get away... You might forget what you did, but we will never forget," the man on the phone said. The more Takahashi thinks about their meaning, the more it seems to him that the words were intended not for someone else but for him--directly, personally.

Takahashi symbolizes the new generation of Japanese, who never take part in World War II, but after effects of World war II can still be felt in the heart of them. The Chinese girl and the Chinese gang symbolize the victims in WW2.

Shirakawa represents the right wing extremist of Japan.
Eri represents the average Joe of Japan, who are nice and innocent but doesn't want to "wake up" to the reality.
Mari represents the young Japanese who might willingly atone for their ancestors' crime.

It's so hard to live up to your early masterworks. "Wind up Bird Chronicle" was a brilliancy, and many of his books that came afterwards while still fun to read where always a bit of a let down in comparison.

With "After Dark" Murakami returns to his masterful form. This book is short but each line is near perfect--there is no literary flab. Murakami's writing has been honed to a fine edge. The characters are recognizably Murakami, but still unique and wonderful and you not only want to spend the night in their company, you want to follow them through the upcoming days as well. Alas, like the night in the book, it ends too soon. Yet we feel we have stayed up with them throughout and when its over an ethereal barb remains in the reader.

I look forward to his next book and I'm glad to see Murakami back in top form.

I bought After Dark at the suggestion of quite a few rave reviews in magazines and even here at the store.com. I am unfamiliar with Haruki Murakami and his work but was eager to sink my teeth into his world after such rave reviews.

Having just finished After Dark I ma simply amazed at the sheer praise this book has been given. It is, without a doubt, one of the most inane stories I have ever read. I was about three quarters through the book when I was trying to explain the book to a friend:

"It's about this irritable girl who meets up with this nerd musician in a Denny's one night. Later on this psudeo-lesbian asks her to interpret some Chinese. There's some talking between the irritable girl and the psudeo-lesbian and the nerd musician and... oh yeah, her sister is asleep. But I'm sure it will all makes sense soon, I've only got about 50 more pages to go!"

Unfortunately, that's it. That's all that happens. Personally, I just did not even remotely see the beauty or the poetry of this story or the characters in it... not even in the writing itself (it read like a hastily written screenplay by a first year film student). There was nothing at all about this book that seemed to carry any sense of resonance or passion and I left feeling cheated, disappointed and extremely boggled as to why anyone would consider this a "good read."

Certainly it is about darkness. Eri, the pretty one is seeking it in sleep, and Mari the other one is escaping it in Denny's and other places. I used to work in Japan and its Americanization, at least as told here, is dull.

It is about the search for identity. They are Japanese, yet everything about them, the coffee shop venues, the background music, the menus, are foreign, American. It is about loneliness - all are looking for a friend, but fail, covered as they are by a cloak of an unredeemable past and no vision of the future. Eri, a beautiful woman, avoids the confrontation by sleeping. Mari, drowns hers in a book, and rejects, sort of, the friendship of a stranger, Takehashi. He arkwardly pursues Mari, but the intellectual distance between them is uncrossable. He is going to join the world by going to law school - an unlikely solution for him.

Playing about Mari and Takehashi is the story of the sleeping sister, an abused Chinese prostitute, the guy who beat her, and the guy on the motorcycle chasing him. The dawn arrives, and nothing is resolved. It is not a story, but a slice of life. It is the author's comment on common life today - boring and uncreative for some. Some funny things happen and if played out could enhance the idea. The cell phone on the store shelf could be expanded into a number of funny encounters. The dialog, if sparse, is catchy and clearly defines the characters. It is more for a film script. The third person narrative makes it that way.

Frederick Andresen, Author of Walking on Ice, An American Businessman in Russia

In his way, Murakami weaves a complex, multi-layered tale that kept me thinking. If this had been my first Murakami book, I'm not sure if I would've stuck with it, but having read "Wind-up Bird" I was prepared for his elusive imagery and meta-physical randomness. I was a bit surprised by all the American artifacts and allusions. Enjoyed it, though; it was kinda scratch-your-head good.

I have a love/hate relationship with Japanese authors. Like many that I have read before, Murakami is very visual and incorporates the sense of helpless- and hopelessness that both intrigues and unnerves me. I enjoyed the slow courtship that the main character unwittingly steps into. The imagery of a big Japanese city that gives itself over to desolate darkness is appealing. I want to wander those streets, but with a knife, as it seems no place for the faint of heart. Some sections were hard for me to understand, and I felt that there were some unresolved issues, but I chock that up to my American sensibilities which want my protagonists to fight until they overthrow the evil. Recommended if you like to peer into the Japanese underbelly.

Let me start of my saying, I liked it. This is my intro into the world of Murakami.
Something to remember, Murakami lives in Tokyo and wrote this in Tokyo. I lived in Tokyo for several years as well and I strongly believe that having done so made this book more enjoyable and easier to relate to. Even being in one of the most populated cities in the world there is a certain loneliness that engulfs one while living there. The two main characters are totally people I would expect to run into there. I believe that Murakami wanted to give us a glimpse of the complexity of the souls of all these people. He does a good job of remaining a third and neutral party. I feel as though I was the assistant to an invisible camera man who was taking me on a journey into the night life of a few select Tokyoites. I like the way it felt as if we just zoomed in like a spy satellite from space and we just happened to zoom in on the characters mentioned..by chance. All that said, I believe the book could have been better. It could have been a bit longer. None the less it has left me pondering several things. Maybe this is just as Murakami planned it to be. Here in the west we always tend to seek closure in stories and movies. This is however not always the case in the real world. I would recommend it if anything else to enjoy the narrative ability of this writer. Will I read more Murakami? Yes, in fact I plan to read "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle" next.

This has got to be the most confusing but interesting book I've read from Haruki Murakami. Not saying a lot since I haven't read most of his works. The book is the not fulfilling in any way (to me) and quite unsettling because of the things that happened in the book. I read it a few years ago while I was in high school and the things that happened in the book doesn't phase me now. I'd say if you want to read something really strange and unique, this book perfectly fits that criteria. It's just not for me hence the rating.

There are two great philosophical passages in this novel that- had they been attached to characters or a story with more at stake- would have been profound character moments. Instead, they're poorly hidden attempts by the author to include a tidbit of personal, casual conversation. The characters come off as slight and forgettable, and some even border on stereotype. I definitely had the impression that the author stayed outside of these characters and used trivial physical details as camouflage for an absence of real understanding. Call girls, love hotel managers, and musicians who occupy late night Tokyo all have reasons for being there, and Murakami seems to be too hypnotized by the world to investigate it fully. It's as if he wanted his readers to feel that he had kept himself clean of too much involvement.

I have been a Murakami fan for years now, having read all of his novels as well as most of his stories. I argued with myself for a while about whether to give this novel a five or four star rating. On the one hand, I fully recognize that it is not his greatest novel. Wind-up Bird and Kafka are both broad-reaching epics, while After Dark lacks the ambition and scope to compete with. Even amongst his shorter novels, After Dark is overshadowed by Wild Sheep Chase and South of the Border West of the Sun. But, after much deliberation, I realized that a middle of the road Murakami novel is still miles ahead of nearly all the other literature that is being produced in this day and age.

The story goes something like this: Mari, a college student, wanders the night in a somewhat rough area of Tokyo as her sister, Eri, sleeps eternally in a hidden room somewhere. But, like all Murakami, the story is deceptively simple but contains a mastery of story telling skill that competes with Borges and Kafka in both its lyricism and craft. Layering plot device over plot device, we realize that the actions of the story are entirely symbolic yet entirely real. Murakami imbues his plots with a devastating sense of inevitability, as they get pulled further and further down the rabbit hole. Yet, when they emerge, nothing seems to have changed, the world continues as always. Of course, for Murakami, the interior and the exterior are permeable, constantly shifting between each other. The reader must resist any attempt to "figure out" the plot and instead see each real-world event as simultaneously being a psychological development.

All in all, this is yet another stellar effort by one of the most innovative and skilled writers alive, which should give hope to all of those who fear that the art of the novel is forgotten.

Not Murakami's best work but still a quality book that continues his reinvention of what a novel can be. Succinct, philosophical, bizarre, hypnotic, pop-conscious, unburdened by poetic flourishes, unfazed by our need for resolution and a traditional narrative, and once again a cat makes a cameo.

The downside: this is no Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It's still one of the best new books I've read this year, as you would expect from Murakami. I read it on a long flight and came up blinking at the sunlight at the end, with that feeling that reality shifted just a bit while I was reading. It's gripping and powerful and well worth the time and money.

Haruki Murakami's twelfth novel is "a short, sleek novel of encounters set it Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn." It is set in a seven-hour period of real-time. The reader follows a skeletal outline of the interactions between six lost souls. We meet 19-year-old Mari, studying late at night in a Denny's and her sister, Eri, a beautiful model in a semi-comatose state, being watched by someone evil. Other alienated souls of the night include a former fighting champion working at a love hotel, a prostitute, a jazz musician, and a sadistic office worker.

Murakami is an author known for his mysterious characters and minimalism. With this book, however, he was too minimalist, leaving far too much up to the reader for not just interpretation, but invention of a story line. He doesn't provide the reader any conclusions, which is his trademark, but with this book, he has released a lot of story threads, loosely wound together, without the true structure of a novel.

At least it was short and sleek, so it wasn't terribly painful to finish. As a reader, I was left wanting more, left wondering too much about the dream-like nighttime landscape of these characters. The story around the sleeping sister is ostensibly the most eerie, with hints of something terrible that drew her into social withdrawal, but the lack of action or reason behind her coma renders those chapters listless and sluggish.

After Dark was originally released in Japan in 2004, and had Russian, Dutch, Chinese, and French translations before it was released in English in May 2007.

This is a strange, hypnotic, surreal and quite wonderful tale of love and youth in the intricate night of a modern city. The scenes are cinematic, the dialogues seamlessly colloquial, and the characters distinct and utterly believable. After Dark is an enchanting novel full of tender irony, compassion, and mystery.

Not up to the _Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_ standard, but still a good quick read. All set in one night in Tokyo, written in a cinematic film-noir style. Less mystical than usual for Murakami, and what there is is distanced from the primary plot.

Recommended, mildly.

This is the first novel by Murakami that I have read. Prior to this, I had read a few of his short stories and expected this book to be as absorbing and interesting. Unfortunately, it was neither.

Pros: Murakami's vivid and naturalistic description of the real and surreal. Interesting characters and events. His pre-occupation with sleep or its absence.

Cons: Ultimately, the "stories" do not gel enough. The surreal aspects seem to be add-ons rather than integral to the events.

A disappointment. Not a failure, but a disappointment.

I love Murakami so it is painful for me to give this book such a low rating. But, I guess, even The Master has an occasional weaker moment. I've read almost all of his prose. If you were to read just one HM book: read the Wind-up Bird Chronicle; if of all books you were to skip one, skip After Dark. Avid HM readers *may* read this book; if you lower your expectations you may enjoy it more than I did. New readers: don't start with After Dark!

I love other works by this author, and so I expected a better read. There are three mysterious suspenseful threads running through the book, and not one of them is resolved in a way that rewards the reader. Murakami's dialogues and descriptions are so well-written that one is carried by their dark beauty and rich detail. Yet without a meaningful resolution of a single plot line, the story ultimately is only a disconnected aimless journey through a night full of possibilities.

Although I'm the biggest fun of Mr. Murakami, used to look forward to his every new release, I have to say this book is not what I love Mr. Murakami for. Indeed, for the last couple years with each new book something seems to get lost. Where is the author of the early novels? For me it seems like too much success, too much demand does not work for him. He just can't--and should not--spew out a book per year, write under this sort of pressure, after all he is not Stephen King or a Disney studio writer...
I miss the magic of his early work. I can't help but feel that each of his new book has been written under pressure which really kills the precariously delicate balance of his earlier works.

Short compelling novel that speaks of loneliness. The backdrop is Tokyo at night. You can almost see the cheap florescent lighting casting a sickly color on the characters who inhabit the city "after dark." Almost "magical realism" except that it is written by a Japanese author.

Regardless of what the other reviews state, I still enjoyed this story as much as his others. I would recommend it to any fan, especially ones that don't want to hold back an author from doing things differently sometimes.

Portrays in great detail the darkness the lies in each of us, the event of the novel all occurring in the span of a single night. Haruki Murakami's work is not for an easy brainless read, the multiple stories focusing on metaphysical aspect of life along with reality.

After reading "After Dark," I feel as if I've just read the first few chapters of one of his earlier novels. All the ingredients are there: interwoven stories, characters with mysterious pasts, an alternate world that overlaps with this one...

And then suddenly it ends. Couldn't Murakami simply have kept writing? I know he doesn't plan his novels before he writes them. There's certainly a lot of potential for a longer, "Wind-Up Bird"-style novel here. Even in that novel, he added on the last third only after popular demand. Maybe we just need to let him know that ending "After Dark" on such an inconclusive note is not okay. We want more!

Portrays in great detail the darkness the lies in each of us, the event of the novel all occurring in the span of a single night. Haruki Murakami's work is not for an easy brainless read, the multiple stories focusing on metaphysical aspect of life along with reality.

After reading "After Dark," I feel as if I've just read the first few chapters of one of his earlier novels. All the ingredients are there: interwoven stories, characters with mysterious pasts, an alternate world that overlaps with this one...

And then suddenly it ends. Couldn't Murakami simply have kept writing? I know he doesn't plan his novels before he writes them. There's certainly a lot of potential for a longer, "Wind-Up Bird"-style novel here. Even in that novel, he added on the last third only after popular demand. Maybe we just need to let him know that ending "After Dark" on such an inconclusive note is not okay. We want more!

Fantastic Murakami novel, and well-narrated by Janet Song. My only gripe is that when characters speak Chinese, the pronunciation is entirely incorrect and hardly understandable, if that. Of course, there is an English translation in the audio of every Chinese exchange, but you'll wince at the dialogue if you speak any at all.

Interesting characters, but the story could have occurred anywhere. I was hoping for something more Japanese, for lack of a better description. To call this horror or sci-fi or even a thriller is wildly inaccurate. It's a psychological study of three young people with a bit of violence and Twin Peaks-like imagery thrown in. I enjoyed the characterizations of the youths, but the story lagged horribly and the lack of a proper ending was not mysterious, it was aggravating. Luckily it's a very short book, so I don't feel like I wasted too much time on it.

You can judge a book by its cover. Chip Kidd, who designs Murakami's book covers, captures the enigmatic, off kilter quality of his work. It takes a close look to reveal the secrets of the cover as it does to reveal the secrets of this enigmatic, hallucinatory, at times insomniac book. I found it hard to put down, impossible to forget.

Hardly anything happens in this slim novel, which is set entirely over one night in Tokyo. But the wisp of a plot is enough. I enjoyed this book primarily because of the dream-like atmosphere that Murakami creates. His spare style has an almost hallucinogenic effect. In lesser hands I might have been frustrated by some of the surrealism, but I floated serenely through Murakami's Tokyo night in one sitting. Excellent!

Wonderful character studies with hints of Kafkaesque and Lynchian environments. It seems that there is a lot going on under the surface of the world these people inhabit and the different levels people exist on. It also shows beautifully the nature of the mind.

Like many other reviewers and as a huge Murakami fan, I wanted to like this book but was underwhelmed overall. I found his new writing style incorporating a new perspective unnecessary and irritating. The plot does not have the drama of his other books, and I found the whole plot to be a superficial description of events. Ultimately, it has little of the mystery, dynamism and metaphysical intensity that mark his greatest works.

I really liked this book. Murakami is my favorite fiction writer and I was not disappointed by this novel. It is a wonderful story of a single night. I just love his writing; it is like listening to music.

Murakami has always impressed me. Whether it be the long craftmanship of his bigger novels, which leave plenty of mystery but give enough to not feel cheated in the end. Or his short stories that never felt to short, they always encompassed just enough to create an interesting tale. THIS book however is all fake mystery and stupid tricks. Granted, as i said before i like the mystery in his other works, but this one is nothing but. is he expecting us to fill in the hundreds of gaps on our own accord to come up with a novel in our heads worth reading? This book is practically nothing. it has the skeleton of his previous works, but that is all. i for one feel cheated by the shortness, lack of interesting characters, scenes, a complete lack of a story, and the cheesy omnipresent narrative style.

The book looked interesting, but when I began to read it, I became bored with it. I found there wasn't really any plot. It was just a bunch of conversations composed into one book. It certainly wasn't worth what I paid for it.

Murakami's books haunt you. I'm not certain that they mean to, but they do. You read the book, think nothing of it when you're done, and then for weeks afterward scene's pop into your head. Connections are made that you never thought were there. Themes emerge. And, in the end, at least for me, it leaves you wanting to re-read the book.
Amazing stuff.

As much as it pains me to say this, After Dark is by far my least favorite Murakami novel. Murakami had already begun to experiment with his style in Kafka on the Shore, but After Dark is clearly a large leap in a new direction. Unfortunately, I can't say this first effort is successful. The story is cryptic as expected but for a Murakami novel the pace and writing is oddly flat. Unlike works like Wind-Up Bird and Hard-boiled Wonderland, I just was not able to care enough to fully immerse myself in this book. In some ways this story just felt like a bit of a private experiment of sorts, where Murakami spent more time focusing on technical issues (perspective in particular) rather than developing the story. In the end, as an old Murakami hand, I can't give this story more than 3 stars based on the high quality of his other works.

Where Murakami will go next is a bit of a mystery. The final five stories in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman were written after After Dark and bear more of a similarity to his earlier style than they do to this novel. Will he return to a brand of the mystic realism that has made him popular both in Japan and abroad, or will he continue the difficult process of reinventing himself? I hope Murakami has not run out of steam, but if After Dark is a sign of things to come then I'm afraid the period from the mid-80s through the mid-90s will be remembered as Murakami's halcyon days. His next work will be the key--as a fan of his work, I hope that my pessimism is unfounded and his next novel is a return to the greatness he is capable of. Personally, I look forward to reading other reviews of this book (as well as feedback on my own) to see what other readers think ... I have a feeling opinions will be divided.

This is my first Murakami book and I was a bit disspaointed. I loved how descriptive he was but I was expecting more from the story. At the end I thought a couple of pages must have been torn out, it couldn't end this way.

Let's just be honest here and not mince words with our darling author Mr. Murakami. Yes, we all love his earlier work. Hard Boiled Wonderland, Wind Up Bird, Kafka on the Shore are deep bright wells of metaphysical insight and terror. After Dark is just terrible. It's boring, and intellectually light to say the very least. The characters are flat and the plot refuses to budge. I applaud Murakami for his bravery in breaking with his traditional style and his takes on the Japanese I novel and trying something different with his narrative structure, but that alone does not make it an interesting or well written novel, just unique in his oeuvre. Let's not let our love of his previous work cloud our reception of his current novel.

Murakami does some interesting things discussing point of view and objectivity. However, it doesn't quite hng together as well as his previous works. In addition, some of the prose is pretty heavy-handed and stilted.

Having said that, After Dark is overall an enjoyable and quick read with some truly likable characters.

Once again it is the same characters, the same plot, the same symbolism, the same themes, same western musical and food references to set a tone. Murakami has been stuck using the same bits and pieces for countless novels now and no one else seems to have recognized this. The main character is always the salaryman who is disillusioned too early in life or the latter aged teen in love with a woman unavailable to him, etc. Always a woman mysteriously disappears. Always there is an element of the underground...a well, a building underground, etc. It was really cool and stylish the first two or three times, but come on!!! Enough already. I think that is why his latest work is so short...even he is getting sick of doing it.

I first started with Nowegin Wood and loved Mr. Murakami then i moved onto IQ84 and wanted to shoot myself, stopping short 200 pages from that mudane 1100 page rant to this: After Dark. What was this crap? I've been burned twice now by this man. I'll give Kafka on the Shore a chance because of the reviews but it better deliver otherwise I'm abandoning this writer.

This book was chosen for me by my book club. I've never read this author before and won't ever again. I realize that I'm not the reader this book was intended for, but I hated this book so much. I felt that I was reading a screen play, rather than a book. How he describes looking in at the person sleeping, how we're standing at the door, the light coming in the window, the way the sheets move up and down with the breathing... so... Then the whole real life vs. fantasy world didn't work for me. In addition, the fact that none of the book's plots ever come to conclusion... there are at least 3 plot lines here (possibly 2 more) that just end... I just didn't like it and will never read his books again.

I've only read two Murakami novels so far - this and "Sputnik Sweetheart" - and it's tough for me to decide which is worse. Neither has a remotely compelling plot or characters, and the writing is embarassingly bad, like a 16-year-old who wants to be a writer. One of the worst books I've ever read. Beautiful cover, though.