Haruki Murakami: After Dark

Posted by admin on Nov 18, 2008 in Arts & Culture | 0 comments

Haruki Murakami’s newest novel After Dark occurs between the late hours of midnight and dawn in the bright neon entertainment districts of Tokyo. In After Dark, Murakami divulges a realistic plot, guiding the reader through several different experiences, tying all of these stories together with the passage of time, as each chapter begins with the hour.

The plot revolves around a Denny’s, a love hotel, band practice, even the streets themselves; all the while, Murakami explores the darkness, the unseen parts of people, the unseen deeds of the night, the things that happen while others sleep.

Murakami never ceases to surprise with his writing. If you think you know the way the story will end, often it’s the opposite way – the characters you’re so suspicious of often don’t even have a real correlation with the conflict. In many of Murakami’s past novels – like Kafka on the Shore, Wind Up Bird Chronicle and Wild Sheep Chase – there is a mystical sense to the fiction, which collects or divides the conflicts of his characters. Evil always comes from an unknown place with Murakami.

Murakami’s keen sense of word choice is still intact in After Dark. He writes on such a solid, stable premise that as the plot unwinds, something happens until you find eventually that the ground suddenly has dropped out from under you. With After Dark, you go down and live there.