After Dark
After Dark is Haruki Murakami's 2004 novel, originally published in Japanese as Afutadaku and translated into English by Jay Rubin in 2007. Unlike the long, sprawling novels for which Murakami was already famous, After Dark is short, tightly bounded, and almost cinematic. The action takes place between roughly eleven-thirty at night and dawn the next morning, all of it within a few square miles of the Shibuya district in central Tokyo. Mari Asai is nineteen and is sitting alone in a Denny's reading a thick book she does not want to be interrupted from. A young man named Tetsuya Takahashi sits down across from her, recognizes her as the younger sister of a girl he once dated, and asks her to help him with a Chinese sex worker who has just been beaten in a love hotel called Alphaville. Across the same hours, Mari's older sister Eri lies asleep in another part of the city, watched on a flickering television screen by an unidentified man who may not be in the room with her at all.
Themes & atmosphere
Also by Haruki Murakami
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What you might want to know about After Dark
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
From midnight to dawn in Tokyo, a young woman avoids going home, her sleeping sister lies in an unsettling room across the city, and a handful of strangers cross paths in the small hours.
After Dark was written by Haruki Murakami, originally published in Japanese in 2004 and translated into English in 2007. It is one of his shorter standalone novels.
After Dark is short and stylistically clear, with present-tense prose that takes place across one night in Tokyo. The narration shifts between perspectives and reality dissolves at moments, which some readers find dreamlike rather than difficult.
After Dark is a standalone novel by Haruki Murakami, not part of a series.
After Dark is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.