After Dark
by Haruki Murakami
|
|
| published
|
June 7th 2007
by Harvill Secker
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| first published
| 2006 |
| binding
| Hardcover |
| isbn
|
1846550475
(isbn13: 9781846550478)
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| pages
| 208 |
| date added
|
05-08-07
|
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Read in February, 2008
I didn't like the book very much. It read like something he tossed off, like it was a book between books, like a book to satisfy a contractual obligation: the literary equivalent of a B-sides collection, or maybe a greatest hits collection, only not very good.
There wasn't anything very compelling about the characters. They were wooden, and not very fleshed out, like vaguely romanticized caricatures.
The narrative suffered--I'm guessing--because of the translation; there were details her...more
I didn't like the book very much. It read like something he tossed off, like it was a book between books, like a book to satisfy a contractual obligation: the literary equivalent of a B-sides collection, or maybe a greatest hits collection, only not very good.
There wasn't anything very compelling about the characters. They were wooden, and not very fleshed out, like vaguely romanticized caricatures.
The narrative suffered--I'm guessing--because of the translation; there were details here and there that sort of pulled me out of the story to wonder how true they were: the main girl, a book-reading, chain-smoking, Godard-loving 19 year old, hangs out at Denny's--in Japan, although plausible, is it likely? It doesn't matter because every time it came up, I'd wonder the same thing; also, the girl wears a baseball cap (which I buy b/c baseball is huge in Japan), but it's a Red Sox cap (which I don't buy, b/c, even though baseball is huge in Japan, they have THEIR OWN TEAMS). How hard would that have been...to give her a cap w/ a Japanese team's logo? It's bad translating, unless Murakami wrote it in the original, too, which would speak more about his cultural and financial opportunism (how will this sell in the States, perhaps?) than the affected "disaffected teenager" he was creating.
The translation may also have something to do with the fact that the novel reads like a poorly written, adolescent's graphic novel, particular the psuedo-romance that sort-of blossoms between two late-teens characters. The dialog is bad enough in some instances that it pulled me from the story to consider its plausibility...
Here's some sample thought-dialog, by the book-reader's intellectually opposite and inferior older sister:
For some reason, a different kind of reality has taken the place of my normal reality. Wherever it might have been brought from, whoever might have carried me here, I have been left shut up entirely alone in this strange, dusty, viewless room with no exit. Could I have lost my mind and, as a result, been sent to some kind of institution? After all, who gets to bring her own bed along when she enters the hospital? And besides this simply doesn't look like a hospital room. Neither does it look like a prison cell. It's just a big, empty room.
Who in the world talks like this? Who in the world thinks like this? The book expects us to buy it, however. But in complete sentences? In complete paragraphs? And, let's not forget that the thinker of these thoughts is young, at most in her early twenties. As the narrative clearly establishes, she is poorly-schooled, and actually so pretty she's a model which caused her to further neglect her studies. And yet, you want me to believe she can think like this after just waking up in what is apparently a place she does not recognize? I know it's set in Japan, and I know the stereotypes about disciplined schooling in Japan, but c'mon...it reads entirely disingenuous.
It's cold, and it sounds like a paper: Could I have lost my mind and, as a result, been sent to some kind of institution? Yeah, the grammar asylum.
There was an interesting device employed by the narrative: first-person camera narration, with tracking, zooms, close-ups, and phrases like "We turn the camera..." and "We pull in to see..." Maybe that's second person camera...I don't know......less
Read in May, 2007
Haruki Murakami is a master at meaningful misdirection, which makes him something of a kind of magician on the page. Elements present themselves to create a kind of supernatural mystery. For example: early on in this book, an unplugged television presents the darkened image of a man watching the sleeping figure in the bedroom beyond. Naturally, such an image is out to create a driving curiosity in the reader--a curiosity to find out who this person is, what power is at work here.
But, as the...more
Haruki Murakami is a master at meaningful misdirection, which makes him something of a kind of magician on the page. Elements present themselves to create a kind of supernatural mystery. For example: early on in this book, an unplugged television presents the darkened image of a man watching the sleeping figure in the bedroom beyond. Naturally, such an image is out to create a driving curiosity in the reader--a curiosity to find out who this person is, what power is at work here.
But, as the seasoned Murakami reader might soon realize, mysteries like this often go unresolved in his books. Murakami's characters are often at the whim of grander powers that they will never understand nor control. Instead, they must learn to live under the thumb of such powers. It all sounds like a kind of existentialism, but Murakami's characters are suprisingly casual in this position.
This novel is an exploration of night dwellers, those who exist after midnight, when the trains no longer run and those stuck in the city have to wait until dawn for release. Whether they are managers of love hotels who once had profitable careers as professional wrestlers, or Chinese prostitutes, or those who like to beat up Chinese prostitutes, or young students who like to practice their trombones in all-night jam sessions, these are all people with pasts, with stories that darken their shadows just a little bit more. The story revolves around Mari Asai, a young girl who has always felt a far second from her sister, Eri, who is a model. But Eri has been asleep for two months, so Mari likes to spend her nights at a Denny's, reading books.
From this Denny's, Mari encounters most of the other odd characters of this book, characters who have stories to tell and histories to relate, advice to give. They come across not as people scared of the powers that hold sway over them, but of people trying to get through their day-to-day existence, no matter how messy that existence can get at times. Like a lot of Murakami books, Mari and Takahashi are characters searching for connection, maybe even searching for emotion itself. The scenes and dialogue are very organic and natural, interspersed with little reminders that something more powerful is at work, something mysterious that may never be resolved, but hopefully the characters will find their own resolutions within the realm of forces they will never understand, though they may leave their own reflections behind in mirrors.
Though not one of the more compelling Murakami books because of a rather seemingly loose set-up and beginning, and there were times that I was a little dubious of Jay Rubin's translation choices, _After Dark_ has a satisfying conclusion and a smooth read throughout. Perhaps this was Murakami enjoying the kind of conversational tones he got to present in Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche in his interviews of the victims of the Tokyo Sarin attacks, where tuna fish and jazz history is a more prevalent point of conversation than the mysterious power that steals people's reflections.
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bookshelves:
2008
Read in May, 2008
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 &...more
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....less
Read in February, 2008
recommends it for:
Aislinn, Lindsay, Liz, Elena, Tamara
I believe that the power of Murakami's work is in it's ability to make the regular irregular. After reading this book I was speaking with someone about how his books generally belong in a genre that I find hard to define. I almost want to consider his work some kind of Science Fiction because they can at times seem to be so fantastically strange...But the truth is they aren't really Science Fiction...I don't claim to be able to define his genre, but I feel that in his work, in particular this ...more
I believe that the power of Murakami's work is in it's ability to make the regular irregular. After reading this book I was speaking with someone about how his books generally belong in a genre that I find hard to define. I almost want to consider his work some kind of Science Fiction because they can at times seem to be so fantastically strange...But the truth is they aren't really Science Fiction...I don't claim to be able to define his genre, but I feel that in his work, in particular this book, Murakami weaves a story of regular people, people with nothing special about them other than the fact that they are the subjects of the stories he is telling...but it is in that regular, 'nothing special about them' way that they become much more interesting than even the most out of the ordinary characters we can imagine...their regularity is exactly what makes them intensely interesting...However, for myself, it is also the possibility that these characters may be a reflection of many of the people who read Murakami's stories that makes them much more exciting...thus creating a sense that our own, not extremely out of the ordinary lives may in fact be a much more interesting adventure than we had previously imagined...the possibility that the mundane and the 'normal' and the regular are in fact not what they appear to be...Hence the power of his work seems to lie in the feeling that as strange and fantastical or as mundane and regular as his stories may seem they all rest on a precipice of believability...there is always, to myself anyways, a possibility that what he is describing is not completely out of the realm of what may be possible...This is not Murakami's strangest story, but it comes highly recommended from someone who has read all of his books. Anyone who has read his stories will know that there are two 'basic' types, the 'Norwegian Wood' type and the 'Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World' type. This story falls into the 'Norwegian Wood' type, meaning it is strange, but not dramatically so. I highly recommend it and I believe that some might find the narrative perspective quite interesting, it's a bit on the unusual side, but very interesting and mysterious....less
bookshelves:
vicarious-travel
Read in November, 2007
I started this book at 3:30 on an insomniatic Friday night and finished it on the subway on the way to work on Tuesday. It was a rather apropos reading schedule considering the format of After Dark which begins around midnight and ends around 7 AM.
It's a simple and sufficiently enjoyable book--one that I'm sure hardcore fans and mild appreciators can both agree is 'Minor Murakami.' But it brings up an interesting conflict that I think is implicit in Murakami's writing, namely that hi...more
I started this book at 3:30 on an insomniatic Friday night and finished it on the subway on the way to work on Tuesday. It was a rather apropos reading schedule considering the format of After Dark which begins around midnight and ends around 7 AM.
It's a simple and sufficiently enjoyable book--one that I'm sure hardcore fans and mild appreciators can both agree is 'Minor Murakami.' But it brings up an interesting conflict that I think is implicit in Murakami's writing, namely that his ideas often outstrip his prose. And while I found After Dark to be a little cutesy and gimmicky and perhaps beneath what Murakami is capable of, I do think that it's subject matter is far better suited to his writing style than say--and I know I'm about to wholly alienate a good 58% of you--The Wind-Up Bird Chronical, which was so sprawling and large that by the time I got to the end of it I was perhaps, impressed at the expanse of the novel, but not terribly sure of why any of it actually mattered.
It's not to say that Murakami can't write about larger, more involved, more resonant topics. I hear, for instance, that his essays about the Kobe earthquake and the posion gas attacks in the Tokyo subway are quite good. And I was strangely moved after reading Hardboiled Wonderland. But even in the case of the latter, we're dealing with unicorns, and time travel, and secret subway tunnels, and then finally, something larger, something more tangible in the midst of all of his fantasies. And I suppose I trust more in his ability to deal with a Big Idea like the vulnerability of memory than I do in his ability to render accountability for Japan's role in mainland China massacres and its actions in Manchuria.
I read Murakami for his 'pop sensibility,' for his aging jazz aficiandos and Beatles fan self-stand ins and his fondness for mysticizing the darker, more hidden worlds within urban settings. I like his quirkiness. I like the fact that he conned The New Yorker into publishing a story about a talking monkey.
I like, truth be told, Sputnik Sweetheart best, which I realize does not make me his 'ideal reader.'
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Read in November, 2007
(My full review of this book is larger than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find it at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)
"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper."
...more
(My full review of this book is larger than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find it at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)
"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper."
There are lots of people out there, myself included, who believe Japanese author Haruki Murakami to be the creator these days of some of the most beautiful dialogue currently being produced on the planet; and after coming across an example like the one above, how really can you not agree? For years a well-known secret among the Western world's literary hipsters, it was not until Murakami's embrace by indie heavy-hitter McSweeney's at the turn of the millennium that he acquired a mainstream following within English-speaking countries; now that his work is getting more and more known, however, there are more and more people now aware of what a magical and sometimes almost perfect thing a Murakami novel is. I'll admit right off the bat, for example, that I'm a big and longtime fan of Murakami myself; that before today's review I had already read four of his thirteen books now available in English, and in fact love his work so much that I've named one of my past Macintoshes after him. (See, anytime I acquire another Mac, I rename the hard drive after a writer I really admire, so that I can tell them apart when linking them together as an in-home network...and, um...er, never mind.)
Murakami's latest English novel, then, the slim but still deeply strange After Dark, becomes this week my fifth full-length novel of his, and in fact......less
Has a copy to sell/swap
—
Read in July, 2007
recommends it for:
people who like thinking about feelings.
Murakami is not a great author for passive readers. If your main interest in fiction is plot and story, and especially if you tend to be the sort of reader who plows straight through a book and then thinks about it only after you're done, "After Dark" is going to be unsatisfying.
To me, Murakami is a great author for teaching you how to read (forgive me) proactively. He works a lot with impressions and mood, so that it's most rewarding when the reader stops after every few sentenc...more
Murakami is not a great author for passive readers. If your main interest in fiction is plot and story, and especially if you tend to be the sort of reader who plows straight through a book and then thinks about it only after you're done, "After Dark" is going to be unsatisfying.
To me, Murakami is a great author for teaching you how to read (forgive me) proactively. He works a lot with impressions and mood, so that it's most rewarding when the reader stops after every few sentences and chews on what's happening.
On the surface, not a lot happens in "After Dark". There's a girl, Mari, who's staying up all night in a Denny's in an unnamed city, just trying to be by herself and not trying to accomplish much else. Her sister Eri is what I'd call dramatically asleep - unconscious for an indeterminate amount of time, but not comatose or otherwise unhealthy. So right away, this is not the basis for a summer blockbuster film. There are other characters and interesting Things that Happen, of course, it's just a slow start to a leisurely sort of book.
Overall, I'd say this book is about how large groups of people are an organism in and of themselves, and about how that faceless, inexorable organism can possibly be built out of gangsters and also of people who like to sit in a Denny's and read books.
If impressionistic novels are your cup of tea, then you'll enjoy this book and you'll loooooooooooooooooove some of his longer stuff, like "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" or "Wild Sheep Chase". The first time I read a Murakami novel I ended with the impression that I missed something important, and I only started to "get" his work after I stopped to smell the creeping dread. This book is a good Murakami litmus test - don't bother with his longer work if you don't like it. I liked it....less
Read in April, 2008
recommends it for:
Literary readers, fans of Kafka, fans of dialogue
Don't let anyone fool you by describing After Dark's plot. It doesn't have one. Two people have a conversation at the beginning and the chapters (titled with the minutes they began during that night) follow them or people in some way related to them during that night. The entire thing happens between dusk and sunrise. It opens with a beautiful view of the city as a living being, with all the people, their machines and data as the blood cells and thoughts of the beast. The disjointed slice...more
Don't let anyone fool you by describing After Dark's plot. It doesn't have one. Two people have a conversation at the beginning and the chapters (titled with the minutes they began during that night) follow them or people in some way related to them during that night. The entire thing happens between dusk and sunrise. It opens with a beautiful view of the city as a living being, with all the people, their machines and data as the blood cells and thoughts of the beast. The disjointed slices of plot and life that follow are just part of what's in this crazy meta-lifeform. Sometimes one scene will have ramifications for another, but don't mistake descriptions of a girl in perpetual sleep or a prostitute being abused as plot.
I took a long time reading this slender book. It's a pleasure to read that I suspect is similar to how people enjoy fine whiskey. You sip it slowly and feel it go down. I don't drink though. I only read. After Dark is primarily composed of dialogue scenes and description scenes. There's very little action (characters only really "get things done" in four or five of the chapters), in favor of those dialogues and descriptions. The dialogues are sometimes languid, and sometimes sharp; the Murakami's speakers are the sort who will catch and question a dangling modifier or a vague answer. The dialogues dance across discussion of classic film, why siblings grow up to be so different, the possibility of afterlife, the abuse of immigrants, why Denny's can't get toast right - all a little too detached when it should be amiable, all a little too positive when it should be depressing. If you can get into the groove, these attempts between characters to share and understand each other (quite poignant since this is all taking place in a novel that views a city as a frantic system of information), it's quite beautiful. The descriptions tend to get theoretical (the city as a lifeform) or surreal (we eavesdrop on dreams), but are generally short and have at least one line worth reading for. The whole package is short enough that you'll lose nothing in giving it a try....less
bookshelves:
books-of-2008
Read in May, 2008
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 i...more
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.
For more reviews, and writings, or to buy yourself a copy, please visit www.alexctelander.com....less
Read in May, 2008
recommends it for:
People who already like Murakami
I'm having some issues sorting out how I feel about this book so I'm just going to run down some main points:
- This would have been a better short story than a novel. True, 250 pages for Murakami is a "short story," but that's not what I mean and you know it.
- The narrator is present and extremely obtrusive, perhaps moreso because he is constantly reminding the reader that he's "just there to observe." This was neat at first, but the narrator-heavy parts tended to dra...more
I'm having some issues sorting out how I feel about this book so I'm just going to run down some main points:
- This would have been a better short story than a novel. True, 250 pages for Murakami is a "short story," but that's not what I mean and you know it.
- The narrator is present and extremely obtrusive, perhaps moreso because he is constantly reminding the reader that he's "just there to observe." This was neat at first, but the narrator-heavy parts tended to drag the further into the book I got.
- Hey who likes unfinished plotlines? Murakami likes unfinished plotlines.
- Both Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle seemed to fit large ideas into an appropriately large book. I would even go so far as to say that the books could have been longer and it wouldn't have been a big issue because each of them created a unique world that was worth exploring. After Dark takes somewhat small (still good, just small) ideas and either withholds knowledge about them until the last fifty pages or beats them into the ground every other chapter. The majority of the last fifty pages were amazing, it was just a bummer that I had to drag myself through the first two hundred before I could experience the awesome, yet...
- It's a really fast read. I read Wind-Up Bird in the span of a few days, but this only took a couple hours today and a couple hours last night. The guy can make a scene fly by, I'll give him that.
I'm glad I read it. It's only the third Murakami novel I've read, but it is so vastly different from the other two, it's nice to see some contrast from the "crazy shit happens somehow and is awesome" formula that Kafka on the Shore and Wind-Up Bird more or less mastered. Read it to see Murakami's range and because it's short and fast. ...less
Read in May, 2008
As I Murakami fanatic, I feel justified in saying, Eh. I suppose he's the master of fashioning a career resting on two or three great novels (Kafka... Windup...) and then keeping his name in the news by producing plenty of light as air oughtta-be-short stories padded so thick with fat margins and linespaces that make your eyes vibrate that they actually seem like 244 -page books, in fact are 244 pages for that matter. According to my calculations this is about 40 - 45,000 words. Call me bitter, ...more
As I Murakami fanatic, I feel justified in saying, Eh. I suppose he's the master of fashioning a career resting on two or three great novels (Kafka... Windup...) and then keeping his name in the news by producing plenty of light as air oughtta-be-short stories padded so thick with fat margins and linespaces that make your eyes vibrate that they actually seem like 244 -page books, in fact are 244 pages for that matter. According to my calculations this is about 40 - 45,000 words. Call me bitter, but the publishing gods tell me a novel's gotta be 50,000 words if even that's enough, though apparently this means unless you're M Chabon or H Murakami. Oh well, that's just a rant. What is wrong with this book, aside from the fact that I might have looked more kindly upon it had it been one of several pieces in a collection for which I paid $12? The language level is about third grade. I know, Murakami is Carveresque, and is often so in a beautiful way, Yet here I felt he took four or so characters and put such simple condescending phrases in their mouths they seemed to be Manga people, made up for kids. There is very little sentence by sentence that retreats from the here-and-now narrative--that's definitely Carveresque, fine. The esoteric, metaphysical mystery part didn;t quite gel for me, as it did in Windup... and Kafka..., so it came off sci-fi-ish, and to no real end or meaning, which is the problem with a metaphysical mystery when the author's not a hundred percent twisting up his brain to make it meaningful. Auster pulls these off, Murakami does sometimes. Okay enough rant. ...less
Read in September, 2007
a friend has lent me this book. murakami is one of her favorites and she thought i will like it too. i read it for one day last weekend in lahore and finished just before the sun sinks in. kept me going coz it's not that thick, though quite weird. at times i need to flip a few pages back to understand. the story is set in japan and tells a lot about japanese culture, in the barest language and yet rich imagery. basically, the story, which all happened in one night, is about estranged sisters -...more
a friend has lent me this book. murakami is one of her favorites and she thought i will like it too. i read it for one day last weekend in lahore and finished just before the sun sinks in. kept me going coz it's not that thick, though quite weird. at times i need to flip a few pages back to understand. the story is set in japan and tells a lot about japanese culture, in the barest language and yet rich imagery. basically, the story, which all happened in one night, is about estranged sisters - a younger one who is awake that night, the other in comatose. i also like the conversation of the younger sister with the main male character - full of honesty and humor. let me indulge on this one. the guy is in a band, playing the trombone, and was quite surprised that the sister knows about a trombone. said not everyone knows a trombone, jimi hendrix became a rock idol for playing and smashing his electric guitar. if you'll smash a trombone on stage, the audience'd laugh. i think it's very funny!
but actually, when the friend asked me how did i find her book, "disturbing" is what first came into my mind. an excerpt: "darkness is the time between midnight and the time the sky grows light. no one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit out into them." she said she has stopped analyzing books long time ago. i don't believe her. she gave me a "guided tour" of which murakami books to read afterwards and some info about how some of her friends think about murakami (too analytical i think). hopefully, i can find some cheap second hand copies in bookshops. ...less
bookshelves:
awesome-books,
books-that-scared-me
Read in May, 2008
Haruki Murakami explores that special time of day between midnight and morning. He does so with a nice flow of descriptive prose and dialogue that makes you feel like you haven't slept for a day.
The book revolves around a girl who's hanging out in the city at night because she can't sleep, a man who beats a prostitute and steals her belongings, and the girl's sleeping sister in a nearby suburb. All these storylines intertwine in a sense, but also hold up on their own. The chapters are lai...more
Haruki Murakami explores that special time of day between midnight and morning. He does so with a nice flow of descriptive prose and dialogue that makes you feel like you haven't slept for a day.
The book revolves around a girl who's hanging out in the city at night because she can't sleep, a man who beats a prostitute and steals her belongings, and the girl's sleeping sister in a nearby suburb. All these storylines intertwine in a sense, but also hold up on their own. The chapters are laid out on a timeline and the events coincide with each time.
The story is a bit lacking (almost non-existent really), but once you realize this book isn't about telling a story, you'll really enjoy it. Instead, look at it as a document the late night hours that most people only see in a dreamlike state.
It's very creepy in some parts. I read the majority of this around one in the morning on my porch and felt a eerie feeling during one particular chapter involving the main girl's sleeping sister. This is part of subplot that doesn't make much sense to me and I feel like I may need to re-read it again.
All in all, it's quite a read that I would encourage you to read late into the night and maybe the early morning hours. Haruki Murakami is one of the best writers of our time and yet he continues to be underread. Check this one out as a good introduction to his more surreal type novels that he's very famous for....less
bookshelves:
to-read
This book isn't out yet.
But AmazonUK has this synopsis: The midnight hour approaches in almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. The musician has plans to rehearse with his jazz band all night, Mari is equally unconcerned and content to read, smoke and drink coffee until dawn. They realize they've been acquainted through Eri, Mari's beautiful sister. The musician so...more
This book isn't out yet.
But AmazonUK has this synopsis: The midnight hour approaches in almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. The musician has plans to rehearse with his jazz band all night, Mari is equally unconcerned and content to read, smoke and drink coffee until dawn. They realize they've been acquainted through Eri, Mari's beautiful sister. The musician soon leaves with a promise to return before dawn. Shortly afterwards Mari will be interrupted a second time by a girl from the Alphaville hotel; a Chinese prostitute has been hurt by a client, the girl has heard Mari speaks fluent Chinese requests her help. Meanwhile, Eri is at home and sleeps a deep, heavy sleep that is "too perfect, too pure" to be normal; pulse and respiration at the lowest required level. She has been in this soporfic state for two months; Eri has become the classic myth - a sleeping beauty. But tonight as the digital clock displays 00:00 a faint electrical crackle is perceptible, a hint of life flickers across the TV screen, though the television's plug has been pulled. Murakami, acclaimed master of the surreal, returns with a stunning new novel, where the familiar can become unfamiliar after midnight, even to those that thrive in small hours. With "After Dark" we journey beyond the twilight. Strange nocturnal happenings, or a trick of the night?
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Read in June, 2007
I'm getting to the point with Murakami where I can pretty much tell where he's going as soon as I get introduced to the cast of characters. While this book was good, I'm kind of experiencing what I like to call "The Tom Robbins Effect" (or, if in regards to a film, "The M. Night Shymalan Effect"), whereby the first book you read (or film you see) by a given artist is amazing, mind-blowing, just...new. The second thing, well, there's enough of the same elements to keep you int...more
I'm getting to the point with Murakami where I can pretty much tell where he's going as soon as I get introduced to the cast of characters. While this book was good, I'm kind of experiencing what I like to call "The Tom Robbins Effect" (or, if in regards to a film, "The M. Night Shymalan Effect"), whereby the first book you read (or film you see) by a given artist is amazing, mind-blowing, just...new. The second thing, well, there's enough of the same elements to keep you interested in spite of the fact that much of the suspense is lost on someone familiar with the artist's previous work. Finally, the third work is always obnoxious - You almost want the book to get it over with, already.
That being said, if you like what Murakami does, then you'll like this book. The same surreal quality surrounds this book, although there is a split narrative happening, but only barely, and a much lighter touch when it comes to his thoughts on randomness and chance. The concept behind this book's timeline, that it's all taking place within one night, is almost gimmicky: It's like Murakami is issuing a challenge to himself, to write his kind of story in a 12 hour period, but it's a challenge that he doesn't care about. The guy's all about giving convention a black eye, anyway, so what does he care?
As always, well-written, well-crafted, and well-executed: but somehow without a soul. Maybe that's the thing that gets lost in translation......less
bookshelves:
quickreads
Read in October, 2007
I found myself trying not to compare and be disappointed with After Dark because it wasn't Norwegian Wood... But then I got over it and compared the crap out of it. I thought Norwegian Wood was an absolutely brilliant piece of work, and if it so happens that an author's achieved brilliance has become the standard by which I gauge his other work, then I consider myself hopeful. That said, Norwegian Wood is somewhat of an anomaly in Murakami's bibliography, and After Dark ...more
I found myself trying not to compare and be disappointed with After Dark because it wasn't Norwegian Wood... But then I got over it and compared the crap out of it. I thought Norwegian Wood was an absolutely brilliant piece of work, and if it so happens that an author's achieved brilliance has become the standard by which I gauge his other work, then I consider myself hopeful. That said, Norwegian Wood is somewhat of an anomaly in Murakami's bibliography, and After Dark seems to fit more into the standard notion of what constitutes a Murakami book (i.e. loads of ambiguously cool weirdness reminiscent of David Lynch).
The Pros:
The allusions to Jean-Luc Godard were nicely appropriate and it was difficult, when imagining the Hotel Alphaville, to not picture Mulholland Dr's Club Silencio, The Million Dollar Hotel, or even Dark City's noir-ish elements mixed with the voyeuristic creepiness of Sliver. ["voyeuristic creepiness? - the Pros, Mike. The Pros"]
The Cons:
Bothered by the narration. At times, it felt like Murakami was spending too much time explaining what should have been left implied. It also felt like it was imagined and dreamed as a screenplay... which is fine if you are writing a screenplay rather than a novel. This was a novel.
Assessment:
Eh. Don't let this be your first Haruki Murakami read.
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bookshelves:
read-2008
Has a copy to sell/swap
—
Read in July, 2008
Huh. I really disliked this. Which surprises me, because with the exception of South of the Border, West of the Sun, I’ve intensely loved everything else by Murakami. South of the Border and After Dark, though, share some of the same problems – characters that I didn’t engage with or care about, interactions devoid of substance, a series of moments that culminate in emptiness. With After Dark, my overwhelming sense was that Murakami had a certain number of t...more
Huh. I really disliked this. Which surprises me, because with the exception of South of the Border, West of the Sun, I’ve intensely loved everything else by Murakami. South of the Border and After Dark, though, share some of the same problems – characters that I didn’t engage with or care about, interactions devoid of substance, a series of moments that culminate in emptiness. With After Dark, my overwhelming sense was that Murakami had a certain number of talking points (law as octopus, duality) that he wanted to cover, but didn’t subsume into a larger narrative or system of meaning, and so it just devolved into simplistic dialogue and rote give-and-takes that felt overly dialectic and added up to nothing. The omniscient and disembodied point of view pieces were also rather unsuccessful, like a crappy nature show knockoff, and broke up any sort of momentum that the character interactions managed to generate. I also felt that, although Murakami frequently described the set-pieces the characters were walking around in, there was no distinct flavor to the locale – it could be Tokyo, or Kansas City, or anywhere. I did really try to like this, though - I read a review that compared After Dark to a series of jazz riffs, and so I put on my best Miles Davis, read it after dark in my big city, and couldn’t wait to be done with it. Minor Murakami indeed....less
bookshelves:
andrea
Has a copy to sell/swap
—
Read in July, 2008
Huh. I really disliked this. Which surprises me, because with the exception of South of the Border, West of the Sun, I’ve intensely loved everything else by Murakami. South of the Border and After Dark, though, share some of the same problems – characters that I didn’t engage with or care about, interactions devoid of substance, a series of moments that culminate in emptiness. With After Dark, my overwhelming sense was that Murakami had a certain number of t...more
Huh. I really disliked this. Which surprises me, because with the exception of South of the Border, West of the Sun, I’ve intensely loved everything else by Murakami. South of the Border and After Dark, though, share some of the same problems – characters that I didn’t engage with or care about, interactions devoid of substance, a series of moments that culminate in emptiness. With After Dark, my overwhelming sense was that Murakami had a certain number of talking points (law as octopus, duality) that he wanted to cover, but didn’t subsume into a larger narrative or system of meaning, and so it just devolved into simplistic dialogue and rote give-and-takes that felt overly dialectic and added up to nothing. The omniscient and disembodied point of view pieces were also rather unsuccessful, like a crappy nature show knockoff, and broke up any sort of momentum that the character interactions managed to generate. I also felt that, although Murakami frequently described the set-pieces the characters were walking around in, there was no distinct flavor to the locale – it could be Tokyo, or Kansas City, or anywhere. I did really try to like this, though - I read a review that compared After Dark to a series of jazz riffs, and so I put on my best Miles Davis, read it after dark in my big city, and couldn’t wait to be done with it. Minor Murakami indeed....less
bookshelves:
2007,
airplanereads
Read in November, 2007
recommends it for:
those who have not yet read a novel that includes text-messaging in its pages. trippy.
There was one part in this book that I really liked. A girl is sitting at a Denny's, reading, and this "stray mutt" of a man walks in and plants himself in the seat across from her, asking if she isn't so-and-so's sister. She's quiet and -- get this -- she "looks at him with eyes that could be looking at an overgrown bush in the corner of a garden."
That's good stuff.
This seems to be something Murakami does, actually~ he compares the way one character looks at another to...more
There was one part in this book that I really liked. A girl is sitting at a Denny's, reading, and this "stray mutt" of a man walks in and plants himself in the seat across from her, asking if she isn't so-and-so's sister. She's quiet and -- get this -- she "looks at him with eyes that could be looking at an overgrown bush in the corner of a garden."
That's good stuff.
This seems to be something Murakami does, actually~ he compares the way one character looks at another to the way one considers some element in nature. I think at another point the girl looks at this man the way one is supposed to look at ripples in the water, or something along those lines, and even though I kind of get a little kick out of these passages, the same expression always comes to mind: a sort of squinty one. Or more like, : a sort of squinty one?
Enough about that. There is a major thread in this novel involving a girl who sleeps and never really wakes up. I felt like I kept reading the sentence, "Eri Asai is still sleeping." Sometimes her face muscles twitch, though, and at the end, (spoiler warning!) her lips tremble. There are supposed to be other magical-realist things going on here that connect the stories of the two sisters, but I didn't care because she just wouldn't waKE UP!
If this book would be my friend on Facebook, I'd throw a rooster at it....less
bookshelves:
fiction
Read in July, 2007
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, es...more
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.
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book data (includes all editions)
avg rating
(all editions):
3.48 (2582 ratings)
avg rating
(this edition): 3.41
(41 ratings)
number of reviews: 574
