I wake up. My room bathes in the light of the streetlamp. I’m too tired to look around. I close my eyes again but soon feel in my heart that the darkness I so desire has fled. It hides under my bed, in the corners of the city and of my mind. It refuses to manifest itself in its most majestic and generous form, that of the great blanket that covers the waking world, that of the wide gate that allows passage to the land of dreams. The splashes of darkness only serve to irritate me in their small p...

Clearly his efforts are becoming more and more of a nuisance--because you must read his entire body of work, you need to trudge through latter stuff, like this one, Verrrry Minor Murakami*. The best thing? The open-endedness in some of the various hallucinations/tableaux. The most irritating? His one page-per American reference, and the halo to the Japanese master of All (Crap!) Things USA.*newly discovered literature genre (c.a. 2016)

A delightful excursion into the mentality and rhythms of night in the city and the perspectives it gives to the meaning of our daytime lives. This 2007 novel contains the essence of Murikami’s weird and wonderful ways in a pure and restrained form. We fly around observing a set of characters as with an invisible camera, neutral and unjudging. Time ticks down explicitly through the night though the pacing of life at night has a timeless quality. The characters actions are muted and reflective, th...

Good ol' Murakami. Every time I read him, I feel my reasons for choosing a book as company over a real person, legitimized again. What is reading, but, a singular form of one-sided communication? An author sends us an encoded message, crafted with precision and a deep empathy arising out of their understanding of the world and humanity at large. And we, in turn, decode it and instantly feel a pull on the invisible umbilical cord linking us to this person we have never met and, possibly, will nev...

This really isn’t a novel to be rushed. This is a novel to be savoured and appreciated, and I think this quote here captures a large part of the book: "She reads with great concentration. Her eyes rarely move from the pages of the book- a thick hardback. A bookstore wrapper hides the title from us. Judging from her intent expression, the book might contain challenging subject matter. Far from skimming, she seems to be biting off and chewing it one line at a time.” The words and the language s...

(アフターダーク = Afutā Dāku = After Dark, Haruki MurakamiAfter Dark is a 2004 novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Set in metropolitan Tokyo over the course of one night, characters include Mari Asai, a 19-year-old student, who is spending the night reading in a Denny's. There she meets Takahashi Tetsuya, a trombone-playing student who loves Curtis Fuller's "Five Spot After Dark" song on Blues-ette; Takahashi knows Mari's sister Eri, who he was once interested in, and insists that the group of th...

"Eye's mark the shape of the city"There is something about Murakami that ignites connections in my brain that I don't know what to do with. Such as the scene with the man on a television screen staring into a real room with a girl lying on the bed. He is said to be looking in from the "other side". Murakami uses this same phrase when a main character is looking into a mirror. When she gazes at herself in the mirror she is said to be looking in from the "other side". There are several scenes whic...

“It’s true, though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night.”I read Murakami’s After Dark exclusively at night time. Capricious as it might sound, I do believe that most of it I read after midnight. Darkness encroaching all around, only a dim desk lamp to illuminate my surroundings. Silence engulfing the atmosphere, sometimes unbearable, often intoxicating. A cup of coffee beside me, a platter of peanuts in front, I relished every moment of this novel. Why? I am captivated b...

This is most probably my second least favourite by Murakami. The story seems really unfinished. Open ending definitely redefined I guess. But I feel like the book has reached just halfway when it ended. The whole concept of the book seems weird to be. But again it's a Murakami book. The story was just picking up when it ended all of a sudden. Even if it was a short story I would still feel the same. So many things are left in the dark. I needed more details or explanations towards the end or som...

Another night has passed by and the day is upon us, telling from the light it is still early morning and from our viewpoint we are looking down on a city, we start to float towards a neighbourhood and pick out a house at random. We are now in the back garden of the property where two cats roam and can hear the sound of birds singing in the trees, we move in the direction of a second story window where the curtains are still closed, we enter. The first thing we notice is a man sat up in bed who a...

WHY DO I NOT READ MURAKAMI MORE OFTEN?Video review will be up Wednesday :)

I didn't like the book very much. It read like something he tossed off, like it was a book between books, like a book to satisfy a contractual obligation: the literary equivalent of a B-sides collection, or maybe a greatest hits collection, only not very good.There wasn't anything very compelling about the characters. They were wooden, and not very fleshed out, like vaguely romanticized caricatures.The narrative suffered--I'm guessing--because of the translation; there were details here and ther...

"Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?" I'm merely three books old in the Murakami World and I find myself beguiled by the Murakamiesque surrealism. Admittedly, I've developed a taste for the way his stories unfold and come to an anomalous ending; After Dark is no exception to this.The story actually transports you to those wee midnight "after dark" hours and captures all the activities going on during that period. It's like the

I have a strange relationship with Japan – both of my daughters became fascinated with Japan as children and both learnt Japanese. Then one of them went to Japan as an exchange student and then both of them studied Japanese at university, the other one then going to study at Tokyo University for a year. Now both of them work at a Japanese travel agency . At the same time we also have had a Japanese exchange student stay with us – well, more with my ex-wife. And so my Japanese daughter’s name is

6.8.194.75/5starsYeah, I had to drop this .25 stars mostly because Takahashi is the most ANNOYING character ever. But this reread I discovered SO many new things and came up with so many new theories. I talked about them all in my vlog for this that I will post ehre when its up because I'm way too tired to keep typing. still amazing, still loved it, but damn takahashi is obnoxious how did i not remember him?9.24.165/5starsHoly shit this was INCREDIBLE. Give me a few minutes to fully put my thoug...

It's a clever little tale about night people, dreams (of all kinds), and subtle humor, mixed with grand and interesting detail in the style of so much horror fiction and a brooding (mostly) off-screen terror that lurks in the night.Did I mention it's Japanese? Sure, it should be kinda obvious from such a big name like Murakami, but this is, after all, my first foray into his works. What can I say? I thought it was pretty damn great. I didn't have any expectations, so I just let myself flow with