Review: After Dark

After Dark by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hooter: If a photographer's artistic view of a night in Tokyo was converted into a book.

Murakami has a way with taking the usual and the mundane and explain it in a very artistic and compelling manner. After Dark is a novella - focused on a night in Japan where two characters learn more about each other whilst the world around them waltzes by. A 19 year old Mari comes face to face with various actors that make up the night life in Tokyo - from love hotels to midnight diners, the yakuza, prostitution, upcoming music bands and so on.

Murakami's style of viewing these, adding existential questions and philosophies into the mundane make for an interesting reading as always. Chance encounters of strangers and how they awkwardly befriend and unravel each other's mysteries make for an interesting technique to character development which has been a common pattern in his writing.

Considering the big books he has written earlier, for folks want to get a taste of his style with a novella, this is a good one to go with as you can pull a night outer to get through a night in Tokyo

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