After Dark

This afternoon I read a book called After Dark by Haruki Murakami. The novel is set over the course of a single night in Tokyo. At five to midnight, nineteen year old student Mari is content to spend time in a Denny's restaurant reading her book, when she is interrupted by Takahashi, a trombone-playing student, who knows Mari's older sister, Eri. Later on Mari is asked to help the manager of a "love hotel" (basically a place where couples can rent rooms either overnight or by the hour) to help out when a Chinese prostitue is brutally beaten up and robbed in one of the rooms, because the prostitute doesn't speak Japanese, but Mari speaks Chinese fluently. Meanwhile Mari's sister, Eri, is deep in a strange sleep as she has been for the past two months when, once the clock strikes midnight, sinister images start to appear on her television screen, even though the set isn't plugged in. Over the course of the night the lives of these and more characters intersect in various ways in a surreal vision of a city in the dead of night. The book creates a strange dreamlike world, that is really startling. It's very well-written and manages to be compassionate, moving, humorous and philosophical. Definitely worth checking out. It's a very short book (only about 200 pages) and I read it in a few hours.

I went to my parent's house for lunch as usual for a Sunday. The new issue of Sight and Sound had arrived. The main feature this month was all about the Cannes Film Festival.