It was refreshing to watch them get pulled into the ebb and flow of a fate they have no control over. In fact, I think things are better that way with a story like this, where characters begin in a state of limbo and leave without much change in their status. Or one scene might end with a character watching a program, and the next begins with another character watching the same show.Īs I read, I got a sense that this was a detective story that didn’t want to be solved. For example, Murakami’s way of making two seemingly unrelated characters interact with one another could be through a mobile phone (one character loses her phone, the other by chance discovers it in a supermarket and answers a call). This attempt at emulating Koji Suzuki is not uncommon as Paul Auster demonstrated a similar, yet more subtle version of this in his novel ‘Travels in the Scriptorium’. Sometimes by past events, other times by chance and occasionally through indirect technological encounters, Murakami’s characters lead us through very personal, tragic and often unintelligible moments of their lives. We are introduced to Mari, yet through her a string of other characters begin to form odd, disjointed relationships with one another. As the title suggests, the novel explores the strange nocturnal activities in the city of Tokyo.

Murakami seems to straddle several genres, using different elements from each, enmeshing them in his own way to form a narrative that flows delicately from one character to the next. Another reason they should read it, is because when they come to ‘After Dark’, they will appreciate the maturity of Murakami as an author and his mastery in the art of saying so much, with so little. It’s not particularly vital that they understand it, but it would do them good to take a little trip down the back-alleys of frustrated love and deathly longing that Murakami is so good at writing about. First of all, I think everybody should read ‘Norwegian Wood’.

After dark haruki murakami review