After Dark by Haruki Murakami

 The best thing about this book is that I got introduced to Curtis Fuller and his amazing composition "Five Spot After Dark".  I also listened to other albums by him, and although the completely Free Style Jazz is not exactly my style, he has some amazing compositions like his rendition of "Besame Mucho" which sounds amazing on a trombone and "Autumn Leaves" which is also great.  I never knew that Jazz Trombone could sound this good, and I thank Murakami for introducing me.  Murakami owned a Jazz cafe in Tokyo for many years, and his depth and breadth of knowledge of Jazz, but also Classical, Opera and Rock classics like Bruce Springsteen is mind-boggling.  I learned more about American and European music from Murakami than from any other American or European author.

This is one of the shortest books Murakami wrote, and arguable one of the weakest one, content-wise.  The plot is very undetermined.  It all happens during one single night in Tokyo, every chapter happening at a different hour of the night.  Two sisters, Eri and Mari are the main characters, so to speak.  One is a beauty while the other is a nerd.  One is asleep during most of the book and some weird things happen with the TV in the room which is not her room, while the other is spending the night around Tokyo, waiting for the first morning trains to start running.

There is a love hotel manager, who is an interesting character, but too little time is spent on her.  There is an aspiring trombonist who practices most of the night, a 19 year old Chinese prostitute who gets beaten up and Chinese mafia in Japan involvement with a night office worker (salariman) who has a secret life on the side.  The parts about the sleeping Eri are probably the weakest. The perspective is not first-person, as in most of Murakami's books, but more like a movie expositions, with descriptions of the camera movement and angles, which, although new, did not work for me.

Ultimately, the book is a love poem to Tokyo at Night, the city where Murakami spent most of his life, although he was born in Kyoto.  The characters are much more forgettable than in his other books, but if one takes Tokyo to be the main character of the book, than things make more sense on a certain meta-level.