After Dark, by Haruki Murakami

At just under 200 pages, Murakami’s new novel falls somewhere in between his epic works like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and his small jewel-like short stories. Murakami has always had a thing for music and this novel is no different. With jazz-like pacing, After Dark follows the interconnected lives of a handful of individuals in just one night between the hours of midnight and dawn. There is a definite cinematic feel to his newest work. We the readers become the viewers, part of a collective “we”, as in “we look” and “we see” and changes in our perspective are sometimes even described as changes in camera angles. There are also obvious nods to Godard’s Alphaville and Lynchian scenes which are viewed through television screens, blurring the lines between what is real and what is not. At the heart of the novel is trademark Murakami: “mesmerizing drama, metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory into a seamless exploration of human agency.”