After Dark

Front Cover
Knopf Canada, Jul 7, 2010 - Fiction - 256 pages
A short, sleek novel of encounters set in the witching hours of Tokyo 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: Yuri, a fashion model sleeping her way into oblivion; and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s into lives radically alien to her own: those of a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before; a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maidstaff; 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 Yuri’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 understanding, 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.
 

Contents

Section 1
38
Section 2
65
Section 3
82
Section 4
106
Section 5
142
Section 6
183
Section 7
189
Section 8
209
Section 9
216
Section 10
223
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About the author (2010)

HARUKI MURAKAMI was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and the most recent of his many international honours is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera and V. S. Naipaul.

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