Haruki Murakami
The story unfolds during the dark hours of an eventful night. The strained relations between two siblings, the trauma of a Chinese girl, one hotel manageress, an energetic boy who practices music, an IT professional -all have to play a role in the ways of life, all intertwined to form the fabric of a fiction.
“Eyes mark the shape of the city. …In our broad sweep the city looks like a single gigantic creature-or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old. Sending out new contradictions and collecting the old….” The beginning of the novel describes the city…Probably every city. Where the events unfold
A young girl named Mary Asai sits in restaurant late night sipping her coffee, reading a book. A boy approaches her and introduces himself as an acquaintance of her sister Eri Asai. Later he leaves for his music practice probably his last practice. In the mean tile the manageress of a hotel approaches the girl and asks her to help out one of the visitors of her hotel as the girl knows Chinese. The story continues to unfold the differences between the girl and her sister who is sleeping continuously for last two months, their likes and dislikes, their complexes, all being brought out like a magician producing rabbit from his hat using a magic wand.
As one of the back-cover reviews puts it “The novel could be an allegory of sleep, a phenomenology of time or a cinematic meta fiction”