After Dark
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4.2 • 128 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author—a gripping novel of late night encounters that’s “hypnotically eerie, sometimes even funny, but most of all … [a book] that keeps ratcheting up the suspense” (The Washington Post Book World).
Now with a new introduction by the author.
Nineteen-year-old Mari is waiting out the night in an anonymous Denny’s when she meets a young man who insists he knows her older sister, thus setting her on an odyssey through the sleeping city. In the space of a single night, the lives of a diverse cast of Tokyo residents—models, prostitutes, mobsters, and musicians—collide in a world suspended between fantasy and reality. Utterly enchanting and infused with surrealism, After Dark is a thrilling account of the magical hours separating midnight from dawn.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Join iconic author Haruki Murakami for this surreal and emotionally textured novel that takes place during one late night in Tokyo. Aspiring Chinese translator Mari doesn’t want to return to her parents’ home after her usual evening ritual of studying in an American-style diner. Instead, she stays out late into the Tokyo night, discovering the strange, distinctive people who haunt the city after everyone else has gone to bed, from the owner of a love hotel to a trombonist who’s abandoning jazz to study law. We were bewitched by Murakami’s flashes of dark magical realism, like Mari’s sister Eri being sucked into a shadowy, insubstantial realm on the other side of her TV screen. After Dark will take you on a wild nocturnal journey through Tokyo.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Murakami's 12th work of fiction is darkly entertaining and more novella than novel. Taking place over seven hours of a Tokyo night, it intercuts three loosely related stories, linked by Murakami's signature magical-realist absurd coincidences. When amateur trombonist and soon-to-be law student Tetsuya Takahashi walks into a late-night Denny's, he espies Mari Asai, 19, sitting by herself, and proceeds to talk himself back into her acquaintance. Tetsuya was once interested in plain Mari's gorgeous older sister, Eri, whom he courted, sort of, two summers previously. Murakami then cuts to Eri, asleep in what turns out to be some sort of menacing netherworld. Tetsuya leaves for overnight band practice, but soon a large, 30ish woman, Kaoru, comes into Denny's asking for Mari: Mari speaks Chinese, and Kaoru needs to speak to the Chinese prostitute who has just been badly beaten up in the nearby "love hotel" Kaoru manages. Murakami's omniscient looks at the lives of the sleeping Eri and the prostitute's assailant, a salaryman named Shirakawa, are sheer padding, but the probing, wonderfully improvisational dialogues Mari has with Tetsuya, Kaoru and a hotel worker named Korogi sustain the book until the ambiguous, mostly upbeat d nouement.
Customer Reviews
Otherworldly
A journey into the subconscious...immersive
awesome
after dark is a really intresting and great book. the style its written in is beautiful and really cool. there are a lot of twists and you will still be thinking about it after you finish.
Okay writing style, boring story
Wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. Maybe he has other good books but this is not one of them. The writing style is decent but the story is weak and feels incomplete. Definitely invest your time in something else.