After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has a new novel slated for release May 8th.  Murakami is both a talented short story author (On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning) as well an award winning novelist (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle).  After Dark, his 12th novel, tells the story of two sisters expressing their own forms of loneliness one Tokyo night.

Publishers Weekly describes his latest entry.

Murakami’s 12th work of fiction is darkly entertaining and more novella than novel. Taking place over seven hours of a Tokyo night, it intercuts three loosely related stories, linked by Murakami’s signature magical-realist absurd coincidences. When amateur trombonist and soon-to-be law student Tetsuya Takahashi walks into a late-night Denny’s, he espies Mari Asai, 19, sitting by herself, and proceeds to talk himself back into her acquaintance. Tetsuya was once interested in plain Mari’s gorgeous older sister, Eri, whom he courted, sort of, two summers previously. Murakami then cuts to Eri, asleep in what turns out to be some sort of menacing netherworld. Tetsuya leaves for overnight band practice, but soon a large, 30ish woman, Kaoru, comes into Denny’s asking for Mari: Mari speaks Chinese, and Kaoru needs to speak to the Chinese prostitute who has just been badly beaten up in the nearby “love hotel” Kaoru manages. Murakami’s omniscient looks at the lives of the sleeping Eri and the prostitute’s assailant, a salaryman named Shirakawa, are sheer padding, but the probing, wonderfully improvisational dialogues Mari has with Tetsuya, Kaoru and a hotel worker named Korogi sustain the book until the ambiguous, mostly upbeat dénouement.

After Dark is now on my wishlist.