He leaves her to go to his band practice and Mari ends up in a motel or a “love hotel” managed by a retired female wrestler. Takahashi is smart, talented, and passionate, with just the right amount of weird. Mari, despite herself, slowly gets drawn in. So they fall into conversation with Takahashi doing most of the talking. He was Mari’s “partner” but they hardly even talked then. It turns out that he knows Eri, Mari’s beautiful older sister and had even gone on a double date with them years before.

(The title of the book was never revealed! How maddening!) Takahashi, a student/jazz musician asks to share a table. It opens with nineteen-year-old Mari Asai who is killing time by reading a thick book at a fast food restaurant. The language quite terse compared to his other works and in some chapters it reads almost like a screenplay. I find them to be the most likeable people in the Murakami-verse, along with Norwegian Wood’s Midori and Kafka on the Shore’s Oshima. I always want the characters to be happy, Mari and Takahashi especially. Murakami gives his books these infuriatingly ambiguous endings, leaving the readers to ponder what happens next. Then again, it might just be my Pollyannaism at work. This uncharacteristically short and streamlined work also bears the distinction of having the happiest (or at least the most hopeful) ending of all Murakami’s novels I’ve read. The entire novel takes place between midnight and dawn in central Tokyo, and follows a series of seemingly disjointed narratives that run concurrent and eventually intersect-for one night only!Īfter Dark strikes a chord with the heavily-caffeinated nocturnal types who know only too well how daylight turns the magic of wild nights into bitter regret. To get myself in a Murakami mood I did pick up his 2004 (English translation, 2007) After Dark. I’ve yet to get my hands on a copy of IQ84 and I’ve successfully avoided reading reviews online. “Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it’s not the same as in daytime.”

After dark haruki murakami review