"After Dark reminds us of the risks, innovation
and disquiet that underpin [Murakami's] success. . . . In
Murakami's fictional world forests are imposing, gardens are
strange and playgrounds are surprisingly serious places."
-The Times
"Haruki Murakami's new novel is a dense exploration of time and
place, identity and possibility. . . . Murakami's gift is that his
bizarre and disconnected universe makes intuitive sense; his
playful touch and deep compassion for the isolated human state lend
his words a joyful, colourful tint. This is a complex work by a
thinker who, like his characters, defies definition."
-Sunday Times (UK)
"After Dark rides in the strong wake of
Kafka on the Shore."
-The Globe and Mail
"After Dark is possibly the closest
Murakami has yet come to composing a pure tone-poem. . . . A story
that spells out less but evokes as much if not more. . . . The
novel could be an allegory of sleep, a phenomenology of time, or a
cinematic metafiction. Whatever it is, the memory lingers."
-Guardian
"By writing about the mysteries of the night with nothing but
specifics, Murakami makes the nightscape as vivid as a dream. . . .
After Dark is one to keep by the bedside table,
the perfect insomniac's companion."
-Newsweek
"It's Haruki Murakami; there's no hurry. The familiar drowsy
jazz bars, enigmatic females and affable, directionless males are
out in force and so is the writer's irresistible easygoing style,
gliding us through the darkest passages of a Tokyo night, where
ennui is peppered with uncanny occurrences and a flash of horrific
violence. . . . Murakami is clearly in love with the off-kilter
melodies of the city at night."
-Observer
"You'd be hard pressed to find a writer who offers a more
convincing evocation of contentment than Murakami. . . . While his
new novel, After Dark, might seem slight . . . it
shares with his other work a deeply satisfying sense of having
engaged the world . . . and been rewarded by everyday pleasures,
and the unexpectedness of strangers."
-Newsday
"After Dark is a bittersweet novel that will
satisfy the most demanding literary taste. It is a sort of neo-noir
flick set in half-empty diners, dark streets and hotel rooms
straight out of the paintings of Edward Hopper. . . . Like the work
of the Chilean Roberto Bolaño or the Italian Roberto Calasso,
Murakami's fiction reminds us the world is broad, that myths are
universal - and that while we sleep, the world out there is moving
in mysterious and unpredictable ways."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"A streamlined, hushed ensemble piece built on the notion that
very late at night, after the lamps of logic have been snuffed and
rationality has shut its eyes, life on earth becomes boundariless
and blurred. . . . It is when his technique is inconspicuous and
not when he's waving his wand above the hat that Murakami's spell
is most persuasive."
-The New York Times Book Review
"Only a novelist of Haruki Murakami's stature would be so bold
(or humorous) to begin a literary examination of the human soul in
a setting as soulless as a Denny's restaurant."
-New York Post
"Murakami's spare, intense prose is at once funny, sad,
complicated, simple and utterly engrossing."
-New York Post
"Ever since the Japanese writer began publishing in America .
. . Murakami has been out front, riding the zeitgeist, investing
his work with an aura of the surreal, uncanny and fantastic. . . .
After Dark is a short book, hypnotically eerie,
full of noirish foreboding, sometimes even funny, but, most of all,
it's one that keeps ratcheting up the suspense."
-Washington Post