Good ol' Murakami.
Every time I read him, I feel my reasons for choosing a book as company over a real person, legitimized again.
What is reading, but, a singular form of one-sided communication? An author sends us an encoded message, crafted with precision and a deep empathy arising out of their understanding of the world and humanity at large. And we, in turn, decode it and instantly feel a pull on the invisible umbilical cord linking us to this person we have never met and, possibly, will never meet. Murakami makes me feel exactly this way. I will never meet him or get to make his acquaintance. But then, don't I know him already?

Few other writers speak to me the way he does. Every time I open a book by him, I feel at home. I let the surrealistic worlds of his creation engulf me in a warm embrace and sweep me away into an unknown abyss of turbulent feelings, darkness and melancholia.

I know I can latch onto his hand and take a walk inside the darkest recesses of my own mind, that I wasn't even aware existed. I know I can let him become my guide, my own personal magician with a wide range of tricks up his sleeve. I know I can nurture an unshakeable faith in the illusions he begets. Because as always, he will unveil the grand truth of the matter in the end and offer enlightenment of a unique kind.

After Dark reinforces this unadulterated, pristine devotion that I feel for this man. Through the bizarre events that a set of individuals go through all in one night, Murakami explores the seedy underbelly of a city and, perhaps, our existence. Love hotel managers, Chinese prostitutes and gangsters, a young college going girl struggling with a vague identity crisis, her beautiful, older sister who lies in a state of perpetual somnolence but doesn't die, an optimistic, young man who plays the trombone in a band, an ordinary office worker who turns violent under the helpful cover of the night - these are the wonderfully strange people he designates as our guides to his kaleidoscopic landscapes.
the master of imagery that he is, he creates one seductively beautiful vignette after another and pastes them together into a mesmerizing collage of the collective human consciousness.

He fishes out the soul of a city so bereft of life and substantial movement after the sun has set. He unleashes all the inglorious impulses and unholy emotions that bob up to the surface of our consciousness when the dazzling light of the day is no longer there to help keep them in check and lets us witness how his characters grapple with them. He analyzes and dissects our darkest nocturnal human tendencies with astounding sensitivity. He goes deeper yet and tries to reveal the paradox of dualism in any individual - the stark differences between our daytime selves and darker, nighttime selves and how effortlessly both can co-exist in harmony but are separated by an unbridgeable rift.

I am very much tempted to give this 5 stars but I have seen Murakami deal with more complex themes and create even more staggeringly raw and visceral images with the aid of his powerful writing.
Hence 4 stars it is for now. asian-literature avant-garde cherished ...more695 s Sean Barrs 1,121 46.5k

This really isnÂ’t a novel to be rushed. This is a novel to be savoured and appreciated, and I think this quote here captures a large part of the book:

"She reads with great concentration. Her eyes rarely move from the pages of the book- a thick hardback. A bookstore wrapper hides the title from us. Judging from her intent expression, the book might contain challenging subject matter. Far from skimming, she seems to be biting off and chewing it one line at a time.”

The words and the language seem very simple, but thereÂ’s much meaning here. This girl is more interested in this book than her surroundings; it is more stimulating that the people around her. The title remains hidden; itÂ’s a suggestion that just because we can see the outside it doesnÂ’t necessarily mean we know what is on the inside. We can observe, and we can see, but we can never truly perceive something in its exact form. This a theme Murakami carries throughout the book.

For example, take the man who abuses the prostitute in the love hotel. He seems an ordinary man, functional, capable of going to work and able to maintain a relationship. But hidden in the depths of his ordinariness is a secret darkness, a need to hurt people. But what is the need? We never truly know. Surveillance can only tell so much. We know he speaks of a need, but whether or not that is some malevolent desire or a choice he has to make because someone has some leverage over him, we will, again, never actually know.

Night-time Tokyo is captured through a camera lens; itÂ’s forever gazing on the symbolic surface level of the characterÂ’s existences, through which Murakami slowly begins to reveal their inner workings. But he never comes to any conclusions. We can only glimpse and peer in. As the hours approach ever closer to dawn, we see a little bit more.

"Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it's not the same as in daytime.”

“Time moves in it special way in the middle of the night.”





We can look at a city at night, and we can see the intertwining threads of existence, but we will never see existence in its full form. So the book takes on an almost movie feel, akin to something by Quentin Tarantino. Sure, we donÂ’t have the dramatic bursts of action and the spraying blood, but what we do have is conversation. Long drawn out dialogue that reveals much about the characters and how they perceive the world and each other. And itÂ’s intense at times, and it really pulls you into to the story. The exchanges are well written and almost natural in nature. TheyÂ’ve not been forced on the page.

I did really enjoy this book, but somehow I feel that Murakami can do better. For all the interesting elements here, I know he was purposely holding back for effect. I really do need to read some more of his books, perhaps next time one that has a little more plot.4-star-reads contemporary-lit magical-realism509 s Ian "Marvin" Graye897 2,376

Original Review: March 8, 2011

A Midwinter Night's Tale

"After Dark" is probably the easiest Murakami novel to read. At 201 pages, it's not difficult to finish in one session.

It's also close to what you would call "high concept" in the film industry. Its execution is not much more than its conception.

All of the action takes place from 11:56pm to 6:52am on a midwinter night, more or less "after dark" when the days are shortest and the nights are longest.

Hidden Meaning

Murakami's writing is stripped back, simple, present tense, in the style of detective fiction, yet there is always a sense of deeper meaning, even if it is or remains hidden.

We see the surface, almost a camera, but we know there is something behind it, even if he doesn't choose or have to describe it.

Beware of Darkness

"Darkness" is an extended metaphor throughout the entire novel.

At the most superficial level, it describes the night. However, it also represents the darkness of the human soul.

This level of meaning is most ly to resonate with its ly audience – youth in their teens or early twenties who are still trying to piece together some sense of the meaning of life and how they fit into it.

The Same People, Just a Different Cave

Before people developed the technology to build houses, they huddled together in caves at night, primarily to escape their predators, but also to share their collective warmth.

Darkness then created a sense of family, if not society as well.

Language as a form of communication probably developed during these hours of darkness, when there was little else to do.

Now that we can build accommodation, we create smaller scale, more individualised caves where we can live alone and lonely.

What was once a source of comfort has become a source of alienation.

The Life of Buildings

This spiritual or anti-spiritual life of buildings in Murakami's fiction has been coming for some time.

The homes, office blocks, cafes, bars and hotels in his novels take on a life of their own.

They are characters with their own mysteries that embrace and surround the human characters. They're almost microcosms with their own cosmic significance.

Inside these buildings, we can be easily lured away from interaction with other humans, even the members of our own family.

Sister Feelings Call Again

Mari and her beautiful sister, Eri, are two sides of the one coin (their names are only one syllable apart) that have lost touch with each other.

Eri is at home sleeping a deep sleep that is "too perfect, too pure" and has lasted for two months.

Late in the book, we learn that they once embraced each other for protection in a lift while it remained trapped in darkness in a blackout.

Spiritually, it was the closest they ever came to each other, a return to the comfort of the cave.

Since then, they have drifted apart for no discernible reason.

Metaphorically, they have lost touch, but it's almost as if it is important that they have literally lost "touch" as well.

Close to You

Although Eri never fully regains consciousness during the span of the novel, their reconciliation and sense of wholeness begin when Mari learns to open up personally over the course of meetings with strangers during the night and decides to sleep in Eri's bed, holding her close under the sheets, just as the sun starts to rise and the darkness starts to dissipate.

Open Up and Let Me In

In Murakami's concluding words, "this hint of things to come takes time to expand in the new morning light, and we attempt to watch it unobtrusively, with deep concentration. The night has begun to open up at last."

Throughout the night, we have watched two flowers start to blossom...or, more ly, two shrubs about to re-blossom.

In a sense, they have emerged from the dark and into the light. They are literally "after dark" or post-darkness.

There is a suggestion of a recurring cycle at work here too. Just as day follows night, night follows day.

Darkness Becomes Light, and Light Becomes Darkness

Murakami's very last words are that the hint of things to come will continue to expand in the light, at least "until the next darkness arrives".

This might just mean that we will retreat to our caves at night, pending a new sunrise.

But it could also mean that, all through our lives, we have to deal with darkness and depression, but we have to remember that there will be a new sunrise, especially if we make it happen ourselves.

Is Once a Night Enough?

Someone has suggested that this novel could be the first in a trilogy based around these characters.

There are a myriad of questions that the detective in the reader wants to find answers for.

On the other hand, the metaphorical significance of the novel and its title is complete in one volume.mura-karmic-wonder-land nippon read-2007 ...more339 s s.penkevich1,126 8,831

‘Time moves in it special way in the middle of the night

I’ve always loved the night. The way the world morphs into a surreal version of itself as it is emptied out and those still awake feel as if they are tripping through the dreams of those at home in their beds. Darkness also strikes anxiety in people at taps at the fear of the unknown, as if anything could materialize or strike from the shadows. Nighttime is a perfect expression of possibility. There are few who can capture the feeling of the otherworldliness that exists in the cracks of waking reality better than Haruki Murakami, and he harnesses his skills in the sublimely surreal After Dark as if it were his Ulysses of the night. Following two strangers brought together by chance over the course of a single evening, After Dark becomes an odyssey alive under the neon lights and nearly-empty spaces of Tokyo where the boundaries of reality seem permeable and the impossible might be possible. A sister who can’t sleep and another that can’t wake, a man with no face, dangerous gangs and equally dangerous strangers, and the staff of bars, love hotels and an all-night jazz practice populate these quiet hours as their stories intertwine. Deceptively simple, Murakami’s themes hide under a layer of ambiguity, glimpsed as they occasionally surface here and there throughout the narrative and come together a collage while evading concrete form a dream or the mysterious worlds that lurk adjacent to reality in his novels. With his signature charm, American pop-culture references, jazz, dynamic symbolism, and—of course—a cat, After Dark is one of Murakami’s best and confronts ideas of identity in the face of society, loneliness, and the ways we can unexpectedly slip through ‘open secret entries into darkness’ at any moment.

‘Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it's not the same as in daytime.’

Between the ages of 18 and 21 when you wanted to be out at night with friends but couldnÂ’t yet go to bars, DennyÂ’s was the place to hang. Which sounds horribly sad in retrospect but upon discovering After Dark begins in a DennyÂ’s as the characters pass into the realm of night, I knew I had to read this (also from reading mjÂ’s wonderful review). My friends and I could always be found in the smoking section with hashbrowns and coffee and it indeed felt a place where time would bend inexplicably (okay, fine, we were often stoned) and random encounters led to fun conversations. Mari Asai, however, is not interested in random conversation, when she meets the loquacious Takahashi at the start of After Dark yet the chance meeting kicks off a chain of events through the lifecycle of the night. Escaping an odd situation at home, Mari is determined to stay out all night and is led through situations, conversations and existential questions that make a single night feel an epic voyage. Murakami also shows an incredible empathy between strangers when fate binds them together in unly situations, There is a pervasive sense of loneliness to many of the characters we meet, and the night has always seemed the best space to feel lonely with the empty streets and darkened windows seeming the landscape embodying the emotion. Following several threads through the night that repeatedly separate and collide a Sally Rooney couple, and told in chapters denoting the time between 11:56 p.m. and 6:52 a.m (a good time period to read the book, to tell the truth) what seems random events add up to something much more.

Oh and this is Murakami so of course it has jazz and a specific song that seems integral to the story. Here we have Curtis Fuller’s Five Spot After Dark, a song that inspires Takahashi to become a musician and hints at the five locations Mari visits on her journey under dark: Denny’s, the Alphaville hotel, the bar, the Skylark, and the park. Murakami excels at symbolism and we have many of his repeated ones here, such as the moon. While two moons let us know we were in the “other” world in 1Q84 here we have a brief reference to a crescent moon in the western sky at dawn. That doesn’t happen, and it is ly not an error on Murakami’s part but an expression of his reality-adjacent realms. Colors, too, are key, and I’ll get to that shortly. But also with Murakami we can’t escape the inevitable conversation that he can be…on the misogynist side or at least fairly creepy in his depictions of women. And yes, the phrase ‘perfectly shaped breasts’ is used far too often in this story, yet at the same time it features a lot of strong, independent women, surprisingly passes the Bechdel test with flying colors and Takahashi exists to support Mari’s emotional journey and not the other way around (he’s the manic-jazz dream boy perhaps?). Not that this is a feminist work or anything but as far as Murakami goes it's at least much less problematic than most.

‘The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you.’

Murakami has a gift for examining the ineffable, expressing it less through words but rather pointing our minds through narratives towards those ideas, and After Dark feels one of his most openly examined expressions of his reality-adjacent realms. They always function as multifaceted metaphors in his fiction, where unreality often becomes a better space to understand the “real” and in a way that dissolves the dichotomy between the two. The novel explores themes of duality and interconnectivity, such as night and day, real and otherworldly, and plenty of foil characters, but the theme is best emphasized in the sisters Mari and Eri Asai and their seemingly opposite personalities as well as the fact that Mari is awake all night while Eri has been in a strange state of sleep for over a month.

This is a very cinematic novel, narrated in a way that often calls out the motions a camera shot would make to cover the scenes ‘allowing ourselves to become pure point of view’ as observers to everything. This taps into the interconnectedness and duality as the language of observation seamlessly passes into various characters perspectives or from the “real” into the “unreal” as if a metaphor for how Murakami characters move into these realms in his fiction. This is also expressed by Takahashi:
‘In other words, I started seeing it this: that there really was no such thing as a wall separating their world from mine. Or if there was such a wall, it was probably a flimsy one made of papier-mâché. The second I leaned on it, I’d probably fall right through and end up on the other side.’
He isn’t speaking directly on the reality-adjacent realms but the lives of other people (though, existentially, isn’t each person a frame of reality unto themselves and so, kind of an alternate reality in a sense?) and how close we are to each other without knowing it. He is also speaking specifically of criminals—his close proximity to one helping inform this—and why observing trials for law school led to this conclusion in a discussion very reminiscent of Tarrou’s epiphany of solidarity against death in The Plague by Albert Camus. In After Dark many of the ideas are threaded across multiple characters or situations (Mari being asked to think of a happy moment with Eri leads to her telling on to Takahashi for instance) and if we are discussing criminals our mind should naturally land on the mysterious gang member who appears throughout the book.

Follow me here. I mentioned color is often symbolic in Murakami, right? The gang member who retrieves the battered sex worker and vows to hunt down her assailant is dressed head to toe in black, and his motorcycle is noted as ‘midnight black.’ This only glimpse into the criminal underworld is a walking symbol of the night, or the darkness that Takahashi says perhaps ‘ has already managed to sneak its way inside of us, and we just haven’t noticed.’ And he appears at random throughout the setting of the novel, at the love hotel, beside the assailant’s cab, and as a disembodied voice over a phone left in a 711—the “otherworld,” the “darkness,” whatever you interpret the “other” to be can reach you anywhere at any time.

Speaking of color, look at how telling it is in other characters. We had Mari who is dressed mostly in black except for her fading yellow shoes—a symbol of her fading happiness waning under her frustrated relationship with her sister. At the end of the novel she checks to make sure they are still clear, a sign the journey has ended and she has arrived unscathed. But in her final scene it is noted she has white socks and a white tshirt underneath, further symbolizing that the darkness has not penetrated into her. Mari’s eyes are also said to be a ‘lonely hue,’ reflective of her character. Eri, who is referred to both as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White throughout the novel (read: white) is depicted primarily in black and white: her black hair and the constant reference to pale skin and her room is all blacks and whites. She is also traveling between the real and “unreal” of the mysterious broadcast her body is transported into presumably by the faceless man. This feels adjoining to the Alphaville references, which is the name of the love hotel that we learn may be a reference to the black and white Godard film of the same name in which people are not allowed to feel feelings (Takahashi refers to Eri’s pill popping and other struggles as her being trapped in her own sort of Alphaville). Shirakawa, the lonely IT engineer who beats up the sex worker, who in all greys, and exhibiting loneliness and a general lack of emotion also figuratively places him a character in the black and white Alphaville. We can even notice silver seeming to be the link between “realities,” with the silver pencil of Shirakawa’s company appearing in both and the silver phone being the link to the symbolic character of the night: the gang member. Further note that the cat Mari feeds and cares for in the park is white, symbolic of her caring nature to the Snow White Eri and the sex worker whom she helps, also described as pale skin and black hair, making her a foil character to Eri as they are both victimized. Shirakawa is essentially the foil to Mari then, giving abuse and detachment (especially to his family) in place of empathy.

Similar to the way color is indicative to character and personality, Murakami's attention to light is often his way of expressing a feeling about each location of the novel. The type of lighting is often referenced, from the warm neon of dreamier locations to the sterility of florescent lamps in offices, and the lighting is used to set the tone in many ways. Also we see how light is much more significant in spaces where there is not much of it, as if the rarity of light makes it more special and meaningful in the realm of the night.

‘Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?’

Social criticism are also highly thematic here. So much plays into the way society churns people up into objects, into marketing data and consumers, and other symbols of dehumanization. Takahashi speaks of an unstoppable symbolic sea monster, a massive octopus, that is ‘ 'the nation,' and sometimes it's 'the law,' and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that.’ He says ‘this creature, this thing doesn't give a damn that I'm me or you're you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.’ It all feels a very strong metaphor of capitalism, of the ways we are faceless data points making up a society. He adds:
‘What I mean to say is probably something this: any single human being, no matter what kind of person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you , but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle.’
Our lives are churned up into a The Society of the Spectacle, but the aquatic metaphor persists elsewhere too. When Eri wakes up in the stranger “otherworld,” her space is described as being a fishbowl. She is a spectacle due to her beauty, but it is being a fish in a tank, isolated and on display. This is further emphasized by her appearing within the tv, not un a fishbowl. In the realm of night, we all seem small and faceless, fish in a fishbowl, ‘in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing,’ and the water metaphor appears throughout the novel.

‘In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.’

Perhaps, however, there is a brighter side to this observation that, in fact, we are all a small part of a larger society. We can either bemoan this and be violent, Shirakawa, or choose empathy and cooperation, Mari. We are each ‘a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective entity,’ Murakami muses in the narration, ‘each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part.’ What is society but a collection of individuals? Within each is a cosmos of dreams, desires, and fears, each putting up our walls that might be more fragile and thinner than we know. With this realization of another duality in the novel, the cycle completes, day breaks, and life returns.

'I am me and not me.'

I love the ambiguities in After Dark, and the way it all reads as highly interpretable. Murakami doesn’t often tie up all loose ends and leaves much to us to decide what it means, allowing the messages of the otherworld to resist definite form because, simply, they are not of this reality but only guideposts towards meaning. ‘No one answers our questions,’ he writes, which is true of much of life, ‘our question marks are sucked, unresisting, into the final darkness and uncompromising silence of the night.’ I tend to enjoy this aspect of his books, it lets the story linger in a haze of mystery and multi-faceted meaning with many of the symbols having a duality to them. The novel feels it reaches a resolution (being more an emotional conclusion than anything having completed the narrative discourse on the themes), but the mystery remains at large, something you can almost grasp the more you look at it but can never quite line all points up in a tidy fashion. After Dark nails a lot of sweet spots for me and is easily one of my favorite of his books, and is fairly succinct as far as he goes. The themes are also teased out in many of his other novels, making them sort of variations on a scale across his oeuvre a jazz record. After Dark examines the dualities and interconnectedness that we feel deep down as an itch of consciousness, and is a heartfelt and lovely voyage through the surrealness of night showing empathy as a life-raft through it all.

4.5/5

‘The old temporality is losing its effectiveness and moving into the background. 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. Even supposing that most of the new meanings are temporary things that will persist only through sundown that day, we will be spending time and moving forward with them.’murakami night surreal250 s4 comments Ahmad Sharabiani9,564 2

(??????? = Afut? D?ku = After Dark, Haruki Murakami

After Dark is a 2004 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

Set in metropolitan Tokyo over the course of one night, characters include Mari Asai, a 19-year-old student, who is spending the night reading in a Denny's.

There she meets Takahashi Tetsuya, a trombone-playing student who loves Curtis Fuller's "Five Spot After Dark" song on Blues-ette; Takahashi knows Mari's sister Eri, who he was once interested in, and insists that the group of them have hung out before.

Meanwhile, Eri is in a deep sleep next to a television and seems to be haunted by a menacing figure. ...

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????? ?????? ????? 24/08/1399???? ???????? 30/07/1400???? ???????? ?. ??????? Emma113 52.2k

"...the city looks a single gigantic creature - or more a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body...to the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished" (3).

"Everything, finally, unfolded in a place resembling a deep, inaccessible fissure. Such places open secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light. None of our principles have any effect there. No one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out" (215). favorites japanese-lit magical-realism172 s Stephen M137 612

"Eye's mark the shape of the city"

There is something about Murakami that ignites connections in my brain that I don't know what to do with. Such as the scene with the man on a television screen staring into a real room with a girl lying on the bed. He is said to be looking in from the "other side". Murakami uses this same phrase when a main character is looking into a mirror. When she gazes at herself in the mirror she is said to be looking in from the "other side". There are several scenes which beg for some kind of interpretation because they connect in some kind of way. So I tried my best to link two major ideas that struck me at first.

This book seemed to me to occupy itself with the phenomena of observance. His comparisons of the narrative lens to an actual camera lens is obvious. His prose even reflects that of a screenplay. Most chapters start with a sentence fragment of the location ( a screenplay Int. Denny's or what have you). The book is heavy on the dialogue and it's in the present tense. Obviously the idea of a screenplay informing the way we see a movie is being drawn into this story.

Another major idea stemmed from an argument of the effects of such observance upon the subject being observed, "eye's mark the shape of the city". I felt the usage of the first-person plural, (i.e. "we see this... now we move into this place") was an argument for how the book itself smashes a world into a single view. As if there are these multiple people trying to look into this world, but we are restricted to the author's single view of the world. So he uses we to refer to our collected view into this world.

As you can see, these were all very abstract and loose interpretations. I tried my best to develop it. I went to town on the first 50 pages with a pen, but slowly the book slipped away from the analytical side of my brain. I somewhat accepted that I wasn't going to understand every last supernatural detail or musing in this book. Instead, I let the mood and feelings evoked within guide me through it.

In interviews, Murakami often discusses his writing style. He calls it "dreaming". He will wake up at early hours of the morning to "dream" into the page, then he goes to a strictly regimented routine of running and other daily chores. He sees this repetition and "dreaming" as a way to mine into the inner recesses of the subconscious.

There is something beautiful about this in my opinion. This way in which Murakami delves into this type of writing always stimulates emotion from within me. It is a dream where you wake up and can't really describe anything that has happened to yourself, yet you are undeniably left with a deep, pensive attitude superseding all of the quotidian aspects of the morning.

I that Murakami does that to me.

I that he connects two completely unrelated things that I can never make much sense out of.

I most certainly recommend this book. The only thing keeping me from five stars is the fact that it feels incomplete in its shortness. And not enough of it comes together in a similar fashion as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Nonetheless, it is powerful stuff. I'm a fan.

Prose style: 4
Plot: 3
Depth of characters: 4
Overall sense of aesthetic: 5
Originality: 5
Entertaining: 3
Emotional Reaction: 5
Intellectual Stimulation: 5
Social Relevance: 3
Writerly Inspiration: 4

Average = 4.1
Click herei-dont-even metafictive-madness160 s BookHunter M ?H ?M ?D1,508 3,747


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turns out none of my rules (e.g., short books are better, misogyny is a hard no, i can only read 1 lengthy fantasy novel per year) apply to murakami.

this was fine, but had none of the surreal magic that murakami usually does for me.

but a lot of the woman stuff.

so not ideal.

bottom line: sure fine whatever!3-stars authors-of-color eh ...more145 s1 comment Matthias107 373

I wake up.

My room bathes in the light of the streetlamp. IÂ’m too tired to look around. I close my eyes again but soon feel in my heart that the darkness I so desire has fled. It hides under my bed, in the corners of the city and of my mind. It refuses to manifest itself in its most majestic and generous form, that of the great blanket that covers the waking world, that of the wide gate that allows passage to the land of dreams. The splashes of darkness only serve to irritate me in their small portions. I open my eyes, flip the switch and welcome the light in its hostile splendour.

IÂ’m not thirsty. IÂ’m not hungry. IÂ’m tired but unwilling to try to sleep, unwilling to fight a battle that IÂ’ve already lost.

Milk.

Milk never quenches my thirst, it never stills my hunger, but I always have some in my fridge. It soothes me on a level that is neither nutritional or hydrating. Milk is said to strengthen the bones, but I sense that it softens me. Milk will manage to soften the hard edges of this sleepless night.

My feet are cold as I make my way to the fridge. The floor hasnÂ’t been cleaned in a little while and I feel small grains of cluttered dust, sand and crumbles cling to the soles of my feet. I rub them off and feel a slight disgust with both myself and the floor. I tip-toe the rest of the way and I feel better.

The fridge is empty. No milk. No water. No produce. The light, my nemesis of the night, luxuriates in this deserted white scenery as a victorious conqueror. I close the door in displeasure but in the speed of the movement I see a flash of darkness. I open the door again and notice a black book sitting on the middle shelf. Wondering how it got there and how I missed it before, I pick it up.

"After Dark", by Haruki Murakami.

Even though my feet still feel dirty, I slip back into bed and start reading. The mood is palpable from the first sentence onwards and IÂ’m taken away into a scenery where sympathetic darkness prevails, allowing glimpses into its secrets. Mirrors, shadows, cats and dead television sets become gateways to another world. ItÂ’s a world of mysterious questions to which tuna sandwiches, a set of sharpened pencils, a trombone and a baseball cap are its incomprehensible but valid answers.

Conversations glean additional significance from the darkness that surrounds them. Everyday objects become laden with meaning. I am close to understanding the night, as I feel it both within the pages and within me.

I wake up.my- out-of-the-box-125 s Steven Godin2,550 2,677


Atmosphere. It's all about the atmosphere here. And we're talking the Lynchian kind.
I have always had a fascination with the thought of major city's during the hours of night and one of those would be Tokyo. But not necessarily for what you can see; huge neon signs, the hustle and bustle of clubs, bars, food joints and people making there why home. No, it's what you can't see that intrigues me more. As somewhere out there in the dead of night there is a whole other world going on that gives me the creeps. One of hidden menace and strange occurrences. And this is exactly the feelings that Murakami conjures up in this intriguing, surreal and hypnotic tale. Set over the course of a single night with central themes of alienation and longing in a vast metropolis involving two young sisters, a musician, the employee of a love hotel, and an office night worker who has committed a vicious assault. I the fact there are unexplained events happening that are never answered; where Murakami has put the reader in a dream- trance. Not plot or character driven, but the heavy atmosphere really did have a hold over me.japan magical-realism postmodern-fiction103 s Mohamed Khaled Sharif888 1,019

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?? ???? ???? ?? ??????? ???????.. ?????? ????? ??????? ????? ???? ??? ?? ???? ?????? ?? ???????? ??????? ??? ?? ????? ?? ??? ???????.2016 ???-????? ???-?????? ...more100 s Reading_ Tamishly4,802 2,953

This is most probably my second least favourite by Murakami.

The story seems really unfinished. Open ending definitely redefined I guess. But I feel the book has reached just halfway when it ended.
The whole concept of the book seems weird to be. But again it's a Murakami book. The story was just picking up when it ended all of a sudden. Even if it was a short story I would still feel the same. So many things are left in the dark. I needed more details or explanations towards the end or somewhere in between in order to come to my own conclusions even if there's no proper ending but I feel there's none.

The book started slow and it kept on being real slow in the first half. The writing really picked up in the second half. But I feel the story is so incomplete. Wanting for more from a story is one thing but not getting much from a story regarding the characters or the plot is something I really don't want from a book.

Nevertheless I enjoyed the book while reading it because of the way the writing kept hinting of explanations regarding the different characters and the situations they were in.

But I seriously don't want to recommend this book.90 s Fabian973 1,902

Clearly his efforts are becoming more and more of a nuisance--because you must read his entire body of work, you need to trudge through latter stuff, this one, Verrrry Minor Murakami*.

The best thing? The open-endedness in some of the various hallucinations/tableaux. The most irritating? His one page-per American reference, and the halo to the Japanese master of All (Crap!) Things USA.

*newly discovered literature genre (c.a. 2016)87 s Bob Lopez793 38

I didn't the book very much. It read something he tossed off, it was a book between books, 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, 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 ly? 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 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 a hospital room. Neither does it look a prison cell. It's just a big, empty room.

Who in the world talks this? Who in the world thinks 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 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 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 "We turn the camera..." and "We pull in to see..." Maybe that's second person camera...I don't know...86 s Michael1,094 1,807

A delightful excursion into the mentality and rhythms of night in the city and the perspectives it gives to the meaning of our daytime lives. This 2007 novel contains the essence of MurikamiÂ’s weird and wonderful ways in a pure and restrained form. We fly around observing a set of characters as with an invisible camera, neutral and unjudging. Time ticks down explicitly through the night though the pacing of life at night has a timeless quality. The characters actions are muted and reflective, their lives pregnant with unfulfilled potential. Murakami conjures up night and day as separate worlds, mirrors as windows between self and other, TV screens as doorways into alternative lives, and memory as a fuel to banish the nightmares of life with its light.

The plot elements are fairly simple and insignificant in themselves. The pleasure of the story lies in the elegance their rendering and their evocative powers over our emotions and imagination. Young Mari can’t sleep and passes the time reading at an all-night Denny’s. She is worried about her sister, Eri, a model who has disappeared for a long time into sleep. We visit the sister for time to time as she sleeps, oblivious to some ominous activity that we see mysteriously appear on her unplugged TV screen. A former friend of Eri’s, Takahashi, arrives at the Denny’s and engages Mari in conversation, breaking through her reserve with his innocent and kind nature. He goes off to practice as a trombone player in a jazz band. Mari gets involved in translating for a Chinese prostitute at a “love hotel” who has been beaten and robbed by her client. She befriends the lady manager and a maid at the hotel and has some philosophical discussions with them. Later she catches up with Takahashi at his music practice and over breakfast they consolidate a future for their friendship as a new day dawns and the daytime people replace those of the night.

Mari and TakahashiÂ’s goodness and innocence contrasts with the evil brutality of the john and tough life experiences of the staff at the love hotel. The hotel is called Alphaville, which Takahashi recalls was the name of a Godard movie and explains the irony of its name to Mari:
Well, for example, if you cry in Alphaville, they arrest you and execute you in public.
‘Cause in Alphaville, you’re not allowed to have deep feeling. So there’s nothing love. No contradictions, no irony. They do everything according to numerical formulas.

The other evil our heroes seem to counter is in the way people get disconnected in our modern civilization. The metaphor of EsiÂ’s sleep relates to the her estrangement from Mari from the time in their childhood when EsiÂ’s beauty put her on a track of popularity and modeling and inability to really listen to people ever after. In the process, Mari became the ugly duckling and took the track to shyness and loneliness and, to the benefit, an empathetic reflective personality. I love how Takahashi explains here how EsiÂ’s effective disappearance haunts him:

”…the more time goes by, the stronger it gets, , I’m not even here: I’m not included in what’s going on here. She’s sitting right there in front of me, but at the same time she’s a million miles away.
Finally, no matter what I say, it doesn’t reach her. This layer, some kind of transparent sponge kind of thing, stands between Eri Asai and me, and the words that come out of my mouth have to pass through it, and when that happens, the sponge sucks up almost all of the nutrients right out of them. She’s not listening to anything I say—not really. The longer we talk, the more clearly I can see what’s happening. So then the words come out of her mouth stop making it all the way to me. It was a very strange feeling.”

ItÂ’s a paradoxical thrill how Murakami invites the reader in as a shared observer with the narrator, encouraging emotional identification of heroes and villains, while at the same time enforcing the rule of no participation or intervention with his tale. And if you have questions, you can experience him putting up a hand when he says things :
No one answers our questions. Our question marks are sucked, unresisting, into the final darkness and uncompromising silence of the night.

All delicious fun and inspiration for me. At the boundary of day in this book, I felt was waking from a dream as illustrated in these favored fragments:
The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.
Â…
A cycle has been completed, all disturbances have been resolved, perplexities have been concealed, and things have returned to their original state. Around us, cause and effect join hands, and synthesis and division maintain their equilibrium.

The wonderful feelings I came away with in this book remind me of those I was let with after collusion with the narrator in “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, with the fly-on-the-wall observer in Maupin’s “Tales of the City”, and the with the framer behind the saga in the Moody Blues album “Days of Future Past.” Quite a sparkling gem for me.
fiction japan magical-realism ...more85 s Janelle1,321 261

This was an hypnotic and dreamy novel with a cinematic vision and I loved it! I was drawn into this book immediately and it creates a feeling of being awake while most others are asleep, that kind of feeling that time moves differently in the early hours of the morning.
Set in the hours between midnight and dawn the story opens with the view from above a city and sweeps in to focus on a young woman in a cafe. This is Mari. We( and it is we, often the narrator reminds the reader that we are just witnesses and cant act within the story) are introduced to a variety of characters, people awake for various reasons and one character asleep, Mari???s sister Eri who announced about two months earlier that she was going for a little sleep and no one has seen her awake since.
There’s wonderful imagery, people’s faces remaining in the mirror after they’ve left the room, links between scenes via the same tv program or different people answering a phone that has been left in the milk section of the fridge in a 7-eleven. There’s a hotel named Alphaville and I have instant visions of that dystopic ‘60s film. And there’s stories within stories as different characters confide in each other.
It seems to be about loneliness and isolation and alienation from people youÂ’re supposed to be close to as well as society in general.
But this is Murakami so I could be wrong and I have no idea what the faceless man in the tv represented and I will always wonder what book was Mari reading...
2021 library81 s Katie285 3,582

WHY DO I NOT READ MURAKAMI MORE OFTEN?

Video review will be up Wednesday :) 71 s Sherif Metwaly467 3,694


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