Mr. Fornnarino's English 2, Practice Quiz 21

To answer Questions 13-18, please read the following passage from Chapter 7 of Haruki Murakami's After Dark. Choose the best responses to the prompts next to the passage. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

Chapter 7, page 99

“The man is impeccably dressed. He has exercised a good deal of care in choosing his outfit, though it is neither highly individualized nor especially sophisticated. He does have good taste. His shirt and tie look expensive— probably name-brand items. His face gives an impression of intelligence and breeding. The watch on his left wrist is elegantly thin, his glasses Armani in style. His hands are large, fingers long, nails well manicured. A narrow wedding band adorns the third finger of his left hand. His facial features are undistinguished, but the details of his expression suggest a strong-willed personality. He is probably just about forty years old, and the flesh of his face and neck, at least, show no trace of sagging. In general appearance, he gives the same impression as a well-ordered room. He does not look like the kind of man who would buy a Chinese prostitute in a love hotel—and certainly not one who would administer an unmerciful pounding to such a woman, strip her clothes off, and take them away. In fact, however, that is exactly what he did— what he had to do.” (Murakami, 99)

For Questions 19-23, please read the following passage from Chapter 9 of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. Choose the best responses to the prompts next to the passage. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

Chapter 9, Pages 116-117

"‘After I'd been to the court a few times, though, and observed a few cases, I started to become strangely interested in viewing the events that were being judged and the people who were involved in the events. Maybe I should say I found myself less and less able to see these as other people's problems. It was a very weird feeling. I mean, the ones on trial are not like me in any way: they're a different kind of human being. They live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there's this thick, high wall. At least, that's how I saw it at first. I mean, there's no way I'm gonna commit those vicious crimes. I'm a pacifist, a good-natured guy, I've never laid a hand on anybody since I was a kid. Which is why I was able to view a trial from on high as a total spectator.’

Takahashi raises his face and looks at Mari. Then he chooses his words carefully.

To answer Questions 24-27, please read the following passage from enotes.com regarding a critical reaction to Haruki Murakami's After Dark. Choose the best responses to the prompts next to the passage. There is one and only one correct answer to each prompt.

Walter Kirn, writing for The New York Times, finds that Murakami’s After Dark provides vignettes about city life (Tokyo, specifically) in the chaotic hours after the sun goes down. Readers are given glimpses of both the terrors and the somewhat comforting shadows of night creatures who either cannot or do not want to sleep. Kirn calls Murakami a patient man who is not quite of this world. He is a writer who continues to plead for the case of humans, who are lonesome and afraid and do not know what to do.

In describing this novel, Kirn writes, Murakami “chooses his metaphors for their musical value, not their intellectual architecture, and lets them play on by breath and intuition.” Kirn does not approve of Murakami’s abstract scenes, such as attempting to enter Eri’s dreams; rather, he finds the author strongest when his characters kept their feet on the ground and just talked.