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A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn. At its center are two sisters—Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before, a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri’s slumber—mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime—will either restore or annihilate her.
"[P]robing, wonderfully improvisational dialogues...sustain the book until the ambiguous, mostly upbeat dénouement." - PW.
"Murakami's genius, on both large and small canvases, is to create worlds both utterly alien and disconcertingly familiar. - Booklist.
"A seductive and gratifying intellectual and romantic adventure" - Kirkus.
"After Dark is a short book, hypnotically eerie, full of noirish foreboding, sometimes even funny, but, most of all, it's one that keeps ratcheting up the suspense. At times, the novel recalls those unsettling films of Jean-Luc Godard or Michelangelo Antonioni where something dire seems always about to happen, even as attractive young people, full of anomie and confusion, meander aimlessly through an ominous urban landscape." - The Washington Post.
"It’s when his technique is inconspicuous and not when he's waving his wand above the hat that Murakami's spell is most persuasive. Moving outward from obscure Mari through her shifting circle of friends, Murakami takes in widening perimeters of a nocturnal urban habitat. We get a strong sense, though we’re not quite certain how, of the city’s fugitive social ecology, of the bargains and compacts among its tribes and classes. Women are prey for the most part and band together, particularly the poor and the unmarried. Men venture forth more boldly, lone marauders, though sometimes they leverage their power by forming gangs." - The New York Times.
This information about After Dark was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Elena Seibert
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1949. He grew up in Kobe and then moved to Tokyo, where he attended Waseda University. After college, Murakami opened a small jazz bar, which he and his wife ran for seven years.
His first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won the Gunzou Literature Prize for budding writers in 1979. He followed this success with two sequels, Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase, which all together form "The Trilogy of the Rat."
Additionally, Murakami has written several works of nonfiction. After the Hanshin earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack in 1995, he interviewed surviving victims, as well as members of the religious cult responsible. From these interviews, he published two nonfiction books in Japan, which were selectively combined to form ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Haruki Murakami's Website
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