#FridayBookShare After Dark by Haruki Murakami

#FridayBookShare is a game created by Shelley Wilson to help search for an ideal read.

Anyone can have a go – all you need to do is answer the following questions based on the book you are currently reading/finished reading this week and use the hashtag #FridayBookShare

First line of the book.

Recruit fans by adding the book blurb

Introduce the main character using only three words.

Delightful design (add the cover image of the book).

Audience appeal (who would enjoy reading this book?)

Your favourite line/scene.

After Dark is the second book I have read by Haruki Murakami.  It is slim and easy to read but that doesn’t mean that it is easy to understand.

First Line  Eyes mark the shape of the city.  Through the eyes of a high flying night-bird, we take in the scene from midair.

Recruit fans by adding the book blurb

The midnight hour approaches in an almost empty all-night diner. Mari sips her coffee and glances up from a book as a young man, a musician, intrudes on her solitude. Both have missed the last train home. The musician has plans to rehearse with his jazz band all night, Mari is equally unconcerned and content to read, smoke and drink coffee until dawn. They realise they’ve been acquainted through Eri, Mari’s beautiful sister. The musician soon leaves with a promise to return before dawn. Shortly afterwards Mari will be interrupted a second time by a girl from the Alphaville Hotel; a Chinese prostitute has been hurt by a client, the girl has heard Mari speaks fluent Chinese and requests her help.

Meanwhile Eri is at home and sleeps a deep, heavy sleep that is ‘too perfect, too pure’ to be normal; pulse and respiration at the lowest required level. She has been in this soporfic state for two months; Eri has become the classic myth – a sleeping beauty. But tonight as the digital clock displays 00:00 a faint electrical crackle is perceptible, a hint of life flickers across the TV screen, though the television’s plug has been pulled.

Murakami, acclaimed master of the surreal, returns with a stunning new novel, where the familiar can become unfamiliar after midnight, even to those that thrive in small hours. With After Dark we journey beyond the twilight. Strange nocturnal happenings, or a trick of the night?

Introduce the main character –Enigmatic, solitary, observer.

Delightful Design

Audience appeal  Curious, adventurous readers

Your favourite line/scene

All of a sudden out of nowhere I can bring back things I haven’t thought about for years.  It’s pretty interesting.  Memory is so crazy!  It’s like we’ve got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff.  Meanwhile all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.

It’s because I can pull the memories out of the drawers when I have to- the important ones and the useless ones- that I can go on living this nightmare of a life.

You can find After Dark on Amazon here

If you want to join in, then answer the F.R.I.D.A.Y questions and use the Friday Book Share meme. Tag Shelley (@ShelleyWilson72) in, so she can read what you have added, too.