After Dark

Here is a short sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami's masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. At its center are two sisters: Eri a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion and Mari a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny's toward people whose lives are radically different from her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they've met before a burly female love hotel manager and her maid staff and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman.After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency. Murakami's trademark humor psychological insight and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with extraordinary harmonious mastery.