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

[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.