Having enjoyed my first Haruki Murakami novel ('Dance Dance Dance') I began seeking more of his books but unfortunately university life hasn't allowed me enough time to spend reading long books at leisure as I thought. However when I came across 'After Dark' in the library at just over 200 pages I decided to give it a try since I could finish it in a night. But is this novel short but sweet? ==---Story---== It's a bit difficult to explain the story of 'After Dark' in a nutshell because we hop between several characters in a short space of time, but I'll try my best. Basically it focuses on night-time in Tokyo as witnessed by several characters. The ...  Read the complete review

How else to describe Murakami's unique writing style but 'quirky; bizarre yet true to life'? The style he uses for 'After Dark' is certainly no exception, yet as a piece of writing it could just as easily be described as exceptional. Explaining what this novella-it's 200pages long- is about could be difficult, as it is at risk of sounding mundane. Coming from any other author it might well have been, but Murakami is the storyteller extraordinaire. It's set between the hours of midnight and 7am one night in the other city that never sleeps- Tokyo. Mari, a girl of 19, is sitting in a coffee shop reading a thick, non-descript tome of a book and ...  Read the complete review

Midnight approaches, yet the city continues to moan, a sound "pregnant with foreboding ... the district plays by its own rules at a time like this. The season is late autumn. No wind is blowing, but the air carries a chill. The date is just about to change." Haruki Murakami's short, sweet 2004 novella opens four minutes shy of midnight, where a young girl sits alone in a fast-food restaurant over a book, unwilling to return home. Elsewhere, her sister sleeps an unnatural, seemingly endless sleep - and as the clock ticks past twelve, the unplugged television in the corner of her room begins to flicker and come to life. A young man with loose ...  Read the complete review

"Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night. You can't fight it." So says the manager of a Tokyo jazz club in this darkly alluring novella by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. The plot is paper thin and almost defies explanation but Murakami's writing is so profoundly compelling that he creates something quite remarkable from almost nothing. The action covers the period from just before midnight until that time just before dawn. Mari is a nineteen year old student who looks set to sit the night out with a book in an all night diner in downtown Tokyo. Enter Takahashi, a young jazz musician who knows Mari vaguely through her ...  Read the complete review

In his most recently published work of fiction, Haruki Murakami returns to the heady blend of juxtapositions of the real and the surreal that is his calling card in the world of modern fiction. Murakami writes the sort of intelligent fiction that seems almost effortless, although this is no doubt far from the truth. His novels frequently seem to force our world into competition with a second 'shadow' world, where the magical bleeds into the normal at the fringes of our perceptions of daily life. In this gritty slice of late night life, he weaves together the lives of city dwellers as they are brought together by circumstance. Mari has missed the last train ...  Read the complete review