Life > May 1, 2008

By Meg Smith | Staff writer

Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, After Dark, seeks to capture atmospherically the amorphous, alien and dislocating quality of night in the modern city. In this goal, the internationally known Japanese author of Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has more in common with the painter Edward Hopper or the jazz artist Curtis Fuller – both of whom his book mentions – than many of his fellow writers.

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This artistic affinity means you should either abandon your readerly expectations of answers ultimately being dispensed or opt not to venture past the first page. Murakami is unconcerned with your need for a tight, ordered narrative in which every disparate element ultimately connects.

In After Dark’s nebulous reality — a mixture of surrealist fancy and realism — a sleeping girl is sucked through a television screen, an anonymous man wears a transluscent, “plastic wrap” mask as tightly as “a second skin” and an apparently well-adjusted family and salary-man brutally beats and robs a prostitute simply because “he had to” before he goes back to complete his night’s work in his office.

The novel takes place between the hours of midnight and 7a.m., in a Tokyo with few recognizable features.

The plot centers around Mari Asai, a plain, prickly 19-year old college student who’s decided to pass the night reading in the Denny’s of one of Tokyo’s entertainment districts.

She’s fleeing her family home, where her model-beautiful older sister, Eri, has been voluntarily and inexplicably sleeping for two months.

As the night progresses, Mari encounters a young jazz trombonist named Takahashi with whom she once went on an awkward double date, a female ex-pro-wrestler who now manages a seedy “love” motel and her maid staff and a Chinese prostitute who’s been pummeled and robbed by a dissatisfied client.

All of these unconventional figures draw Mari into conversations that contain rare frankness and real human connection, transcending the stilted, almost scripted conversations strangers and acquaintances usually have.

Besides their names and a few other details, Murakami’s characters could be from anywhere — they reference the Boston Red Sox, Western movies such as Love Story and Alphaville, and patronize such chains as Denny’s and 7-Eleven. They possess globally modern nameless anxieties, too. Midway through the book, Takahashi introduces a metaphor for the awful, mysterious sense of oppression all of the characters seem to feel.

He tells Mari that he has a vision of “a giant octopus living deep at the bottom of the ocean” in whose tentacles every person is caught up in and is “getting sucked into the darkness.”

Each character seems to feel himself or herself in the grip of such an abstract creature as the octopus, although no one else ever expresses it so specifically.

Murakami has his characters each struggle to articulate a feeling of helpless entrapment all the more menacing in its vagueness, giving his novel the dreamlike quality of a world beyond logic.

As Mari goes about her insomniac night, her slumbering sister Eri is pulled through her TV into a frightening and bizarre otherworld that seems representative of whatever it was that drove her to take refuge in sleep in the first place.

Neither the reader nor Eri ever gain any insight into what has happened, but her perplexed horror resonates hauntingly when she rejects her new surroundings as a type of life after death reflexively because, “If dying meant being shut up alone inside a vacant room in an isolated office building, it was too utterly lacking any hope of salvation.”

Murakami’s refusal to explain much of his novel to the reader can be very frustrating. The way in which he strings together seemingly unrelated and impenetrable story elements without allowing them to cohere often feels more clumsy and confusing than artfully postmodern. The novel is flawed in other ways, too. The dialogue of his characters sometimes feels contrived and their insights obvious and trite.

For example, Mari laments that she and her sister are not closer in weirdly precise and uncharacteristic terms, complaining that “when I needed her the most, she had the least freedom to respond to my need.”

A passage in which Mari has a conversation with a maid with a shadowy past at the love hotel is bumbling and awkward, full of painfully banal revelations the two share.

It’s difficult to not feel a derision Hurakami does not intend when the maid earnestly and importantly reveals that she feels as if she’s “racing with (her) own shadow” that she can never shake off and that “people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.”

Despite these provocations in content, After Dark succeeds, mainly due to the sweetness of the budding romance between Mari and Takahashi and the mystical, tenuous impressions Murakami is able to create of his characters’ estrangement and loneliness. Nothing is resolved, but Murakami humanely leaves his reader with the possibility of deliverance through profound human connections as he leads his characters into morning.