After Dark

By: Haruki Murakami

Narrated by: Janet Song

Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

Here is 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 different from 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.

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. Murakami's trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with extraordinary, harmonious mastery.

©2004 Haruki Murakami. 2007 translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Darkly entertaining" (Publishers Weekly)
"A seductive and gratifying intellectual and romantic adventure." (Kirkus Reviews)
"Disarmingly intimate, almost tactile...The narrative flows like a jazz ballad [in which] each character is unique in his or her loneliness, yet each possesses a capacity for momentary empathy that is both sweet and heartbreaking. Murakami's genius, on both large and small canvases, is to create worlds both utterly alien and disconcertingly familiar." (Booklist)

Very enjoyable, but loose ends

I'm a Haruki fan, enjoyed this because of the usual juxtaposition of the ordinary and the surreal, the wonderful use of language. BUT just when I felt that I was getting to know and love the characters, the book ended. It needs a sequel.

...So what?

I loved Kafka by the Shore, but am stumped by this story. I liked the protagonist, and really, most of the characters, but the plot leaves too many points open and neither redeems nor damns the characters in the end. Murakami has us watch from the outside in like were behind a camera lens, which left me cold and distant to the whole story. Everyone, male and female, are objectified in this world. Narration was great, however.

Good read

I love Murikami anyway and was in the mood for one of his quirky stories and this satisfied perfectly. I love how his mystical elements are never explained but make sense in terms of the story. The reader was great! Listened straight through in just a couple of days.

Witching Hours

This short Murakami novel, which emphasizes eerie atmosphere over plot and character, isn't as engaging as, say, Kafka on the Shore. Sleep is a major theme here, and I did find myself dozing off at times. Still, there are some evocative scenes, and the narration fits the mood. Murakami fans won't want to skip this, but those new to the Japanese postmodernist may want to start elsewhere.

reader

I struggled concentrating with the readers voices being so monotoned and robotic. will try to read the book alone.

Decent but low impact

This book has a simple and concise style, and it’s about as easy a book to read as you can find. However, it lacks the magic and strong emotions that I look for in a Murakami story. It has some moments, and there’s some mystery to keep the story going, but overall it just leaves the readers thinking… “huh… okay… Meh.”

Wind up and Kafka are much better choices for those interested in Murakami.

Couldn't put it down

amazing narration and absolute page turner. I wasn't a fan of the ending, very anticlimactic for my tastes, but the rest of it was very interesting. I love the style in which this is written, first person omnipresent. I don't know that I've seen that before.

Intriguing book, Poor Narration

I found After Dark to be fascinating with a huge amount of detailed subtextual issues. The descriptions were detailed and there's also a mystery too of sorts (though we're let in on some of the details. Very psychological. And Murakami leaves the reader to work out for themselves some of the more pivotal things like Mari's not being able to sleep and Eri Asai only sleeping. And whether or not you think the mystery is resolved.

However the narrator sounds like a computer in Star Trek. While I was able to get past it to hear the book, and while her Japanese is excellent and I learned a lot about pronunciation of the names ("r" is like a soft "d"), her affect in English is very flat. Listen to the sample first to see if you can get past it.

Slow and well crafted

Haruki Murakami definitely has a unique voice and way with words that forces you to think about what you're reading. He is also extremely skilled in painting a vivid image and forcing the reader to live in and observe it.

That being said, this is the kind of book that can't be interrupted or listened to halfheartedly. I only gave it four stars for now because I need to go back again and ingest this book more mindfully. I think I missed the arching metaphor that highlights what the book is /really/ about because there were times when I couldn't be as invested in it as I would've liked to be. After that, I'll most likely adjust my rating.

The narration is smooth and effective. I found Janet Song's voice to be compatible with Haruki Murakami's writing.

A story-seen-through-a-movie-camera kinda approach

Because I liked "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and "Kafka on the Shore" so much, it's hard for me to get satisfied as much with his other stories available as audiobooks so far. And I am running out of Murakami's audiobooks. But I do appreciate that Murakami experiments with a different approach every time. In this story, you feel like you are walking with a movie camera to observe a sequence of scenes and characters during one evening (until morning). Because of this format, I wasn't upset that story did not resolve. Nice. Not great, but nice.