After Dark (Vintage International) by Haruki Murakami Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $8.01 You Save: $5.94 (43%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $6.75 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of After Dark (Vintage International)
Book Review: Teases the Murakami thirst
Summary: 4 Stars
Pure Murakami in simple, sweet and shortened form. Descriptive and mind numbing to the senses as he tackles a night in the big city from multiple perspectives. I would not start reading Murakami with this one, as it does not define his true creative ability, but it does make for a soothing read after you have already identified with the authors style through one of his modern gems such as Kafka on the Shore, or the Windup Bird Chronicle.Book Review: Cover Story
Summary: 4 Stars
You can judge a book by its cover. Chip Kidd, who designs Murakami's book covers, captures the enigmatic, off kilter quality of his work. It takes a close look to reveal the secrets of the cover as it does to reveal the secrets of this enigmatic, hallucinatory, at times insomniac book. I found it hard to put down, impossible to forget.Book Review: Decline of great writer continues
Summary: 3 Stars
Like many other reviewers and as a huge Murakami fan, I wanted to like this book but was underwhelmed overall. I found his new writing style incorporating a new perspective unnecessary and irritating. The plot does not have the drama of his other books, and I found the whole plot to be a superficial description of events. Ultimately, it has little of the mystery, dynamism and metaphysical intensity that mark his greatest works. Book Review: Seven strange hours in Tokyo in the lives of a sleeping beauty and her sister
Summary: 2 Stars
What do Denny's, a Chinese-speaking night owl student, her sleeping sister, a Love Hotel, a violent businessman, a trombonist, a female former wrestler, and a prostitute have in common? They all play a part in Murakami's (as usual) strange novel, which takes place during one night in Tokyo between midnight and dawn. The Chinese-speaking Japanese girl (Mari) meets a trombonist (Tetsuya) when he asks to share her table at a Denny's restaurant. He departs. She is later summoned by a stranger to help translate for an injured person, at which point she meets several unusual characters. Alternating between the activities of Mari--primarily her interactions with the trombonist, who befriends her but pines over her sister, and staff members of the love hotel; and the slightly changing strange state of the slumber chamber of her beautiful sister Eri, the story seems to focus on the relationship between the siblings. Additionally, there is an attempt to track down the perpetrator of a crime. Although the abnormal tends to be the norm in Murakami novels, the "dark" part of After Dark, that involving Eri Asai, is overly obscure. Better: The Upside Down Bird Chronicles and Blind Willow Sleeping Woman. Book Review: A listless, minimalist novel that toys with the metaphysical
Summary: 3 Stars
Haruki Murakami's twelfth novel is "a short, sleek novel of encounters set it Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn." It is set in a seven-hour period of real-time. The reader follows a skeletal outline of the interactions between six lost souls. We meet 19-year-old Mari, studying late at night in a Denny's and her sister, Eri, a beautiful model in a semi-comatose state, being watched by someone evil. Other alienated souls of the night include a former fighting champion working at a love hotel, a prostitute, a jazz musician, and a sadistic office worker.
Murakami is an author known for his mysterious characters and minimalism. With this book, however, he was too minimalist, leaving far too much up to the reader for not just interpretation, but invention of a story line. He doesn't provide the reader any conclusions, which is his trademark, but with this book, he has released a lot of story threads, loosely wound together, without the true structure of a novel.
At least it was short and sleek, so it wasn't terribly painful to finish. As a reader, I was left wanting more, left wondering too much about the dream-like nighttime landscape of these characters. The story around the sleeping sister is ostensibly the most eerie, with hints of something terrible that drew her into social withdrawal, but the lack of action or reason behind her coma renders those chapters listless and sluggish.
After Dark was originally released in Japan in 2004, and had Russian, Dutch, Chinese, and French translations before it was released in English in May 2007.