After Dark
A
short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours
between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki
Murakami’s masterworks
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and
Kafka on the Shore.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.
After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama
to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as
memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency—the
interplay between self-expression and empathy, between the power of
observation and the scope of compassion and love. Murakami’s trademark
humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here
distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.
GenreJapanese Fiction, AuthorHaruki Murakami,
Loading...
