After Dark

The semester has choked out its last death throes and, during our record-breaking heat wave, I hunkered down in the basement with Haruki Murakami's novel After Dark. A friend of mine finds Murakami's novels "tiring" and I can agree with that, but this one is short and highly readable. I like it because it inhabits the same Japan I knew (and put in American Fuji): a world of Denny's, Skylarks, love hotels, and parks with sections for stray cats. While some may accuse the plot of being coi...