After Dark by Murakami Haruki

[yueni]

Title: After Dark
Author: Murakami Haruki
Translator: Jay Rubin
Number of Pages: 208 pages
Genre: Fiction
Book Number/Goal: 4 of 16 for the year
My Rating: 4/5

Review: This book was recommended to me by a friend. The chronicle of a night in Tokyo starring 19 year old Mari, her sleeping beauty sister, Eri, and an errant trombone player.

The first thing that I found captivating about this book was the language. It was beautiful. I don't know if it was that way in the Japanese, but the language used in the English translation was particularly beautiful. I liked the detached way the characters in the book were somehow related but not really. I liked how the night itself became one of the main characters of the book without doing anything. I liked that it was really different from anything I'd ever read.

Comments

[torachan]

I don't know if it's the same translator or not, but I read Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes in English and the translation was awesome.

I read another of his books in Japanese and wasn't really that impressed, but it was his first novel and he hates it himself, so I'm guessing his prose improved later on.

[yueni]

I actually went and looked up the translator of the book, because I was so intrigued at the language, and he's a professor at Harvard in... Japanese literature (iirc), who does a lot of Murakami translations, so it could very well be the same guy.

If you do read After Dark in the Japanese, I would be very interested to know if the language has improved since! I think this book came out in 2004 in Japanese, and 2007 in English.