After Dark

Title: After Dark
Author: Haruki Murakami
Published: 2004, and in English 2007.
Genre: Surreal fiction
Pages: 201




It's four to midnight, and Mari Asai is sitting alone in a diner when a young musician on his way to an all-night practise session joins her. They've met before, through Mari's sister Eri, who's back at home, sleeping. She's been sleeping for two months straight, now.


Mari's peaceful reading is interrupted soon again when Kaoru, who runs a love hotel comes in, asking for her by name, to come and help translate for an injured Chinese prostitute. After Dark follows Mari, the musician, Eri and the people at the love hotel through the night, the darkest hours and what they bring out of people. As usual with Murakami, things look normal on the surface, but there are strange things and coincidences just beneath, lurking in the night.


Darn, now I want to read Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World again... I like Murakami's strange, poetic worlds. The SO and I went to Italy for a holiday last week, and this was my flight-treat. Read most of it on the way back, drowning out the endless babbling from the two ladies behind us. I swear, they didn't stop for breath.





Mari thinks about what Korogi said. "I do feel that I've managed to make something I could maybe call my own world... over time... little by little. And when I'm inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I'm a weak person, that I bruise easily, don't you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It's like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere."