After Dark (Unabridged)
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4.5 • 8 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore.
At its center are two sisters–Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before, a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman.
After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency. Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Join iconic author Haruki Murakami for this surreal and emotionally textured novel that takes place during one late night in Tokyo. Aspiring Chinese translator Mari doesn’t want to return to her parents’ home after her usual evening ritual of studying in an American-style diner. Instead, she stays out late into the Tokyo night, discovering the strange, distinctive people who haunt the city after everyone else has gone to bed, from the owner of a love hotel to a trombonist who’s abandoning jazz to study law. We were bewitched by Murakami’s flashes of dark magical realism, like Mari’s sister Eri being sucked into a shadowy, insubstantial realm on the other side of her TV screen. With narrator Janet Song as your calm but intense guide, After Dark will take you on a wild nocturnal journey through Tokyo.
