Afterdark

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Afterdark ( Japanese ア フ タ ー ダ ー ク Afutā Dāku [= After Dark] ) is a novel by Haruki Murakami . It was published in Japanese in 2004 and in German translation by Ursula Gräfe in 2005 by DuMont Buchverlag .

content

Afterdark consists of 18 chapters and tells the story of several people in Tokyo between 11:56 p.m. and 6:52 a.m.

At the beginning, the student Mari meets a friend of her sister Eri in a fast-food restaurant belonging to the Denny’s Takahashi chain . The conversation revolves around the fact that Takahashi always orders the chicken salad there, but Mari refuses because the chicken comes from factory farming. Takahashi also learns that Mari attended a Chinese school and speaks Chinese.

After Takahashi says goodbye because he has to go to a trumpet rehearsal, Mari receives a visit from an employee of the Love Hotel Alphaville . Mari is asked to interpret Chinese because a prostitute has been beaten by a client, but they cannot call the police because the prostitute is illegally in the country. Instead, they print out the picture of the client taken by the surveillance camera and instruct the mafia to get hold of the perpetrator.

Then Mari goes to another fast food restaurant, where she meets again with Takahashi, who has returned from his trumpet rehearsal. They talk about how the sisters Mari and Eri are very different from each other. Takahashi talks about his law degree and recommends Mari the film Love Story. When Takahashi eats a tuna sandwich, Mari throws in that tuna is unhealthy too, because it accumulates mercury. In the end, Mari confesses that she will soon be starting a semester abroad in Beijing.

After daybreak, Takahashi found a cell phone in the cheese counter of a Seven Eleven branch that a customer had left there. When he calls the last caller, he notices that he is insulting and threatening him.

At the same time Mari arrives at home and lies down next to Eri, whose room was faded in several times during the narration.

criticism

“No chance: in addition to 'Afterdark', even socio-educational 80s children's books like ' Neues vom Süderhof ' or ' The Pizza Gang ' appear uncomfortable, demanding, fascinatingly ambivalent. [...] And the popular closing phrase 'possibly interesting for completists' does not apply in this case: Completists in particular should avoid this book as far as possible. Provided that they want to remain completeists. "

- Stefan Mesch : literaturkritik.de

literature

  • Haruki Murakami: Afterdark. Novel. Translated from the Japanese by Ursula Gräfe. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-8321-7940-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://literaturkritik.de/id/8864