After dark, Haruki Murakami
book-japan
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The action of the book "After Dark" takes place in Tokyo during a single night, roughly from dusk to dawn. "After dark" signifies both the narrative time and a state of the world in which ordinary social roles lose their sharpness, and people appear more as nocturnal functions, transitions, and semi-presences than as persons.
After Dark is also the title of a piece of music, specifically—Five Spot After Dark by Curtis Fuller.
Takahashi, a trombone-playing boy, tells Mari in Denny's restaurant that it was this very track from the album Blues-ette that made him choose the trombone as his instrument, or rather, the trombone chose him.
The jazz form carries over into the composition of the novel: brief entrances, shifts in perspective, recurring motifs, the nocturnal rhythm of the city, pauses, scenes like improvised phrases. The book does not tell a plot—it plays it like jazz.
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