BOOK REVIEW: After Dark by Haruki Murakami

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

(Goodreads)

A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore.  

At its center are two sisters—Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before, a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri’s slumber—mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime—will either restore or annihilate her.  

After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency—the interplay between self-expression and empathy, between the power of observation and the scope of compassion and love. Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.

What's interesting about this novel isn't about where it takes place, but when it takes place. After Dark spans its 200 pages from the hours of 11:56pm to 6:52am. What happens in between those hours is a mixture of events that can only happen to one, well, after dark. Bumping into a guy that liked (likes?) your sister, helping a retired wrestler that runs a love hotel, and jumping from strange place to strange place in order to pass the slow time of the night.

"It's true, though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night," the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette. "You can't fight it." (78)

Murakami doesn't fail to bring in the magical realism in his works. While After Dark takes place in a completely average world, there's a eeriness that creeps up on the pages when you least expect it. The chapters focusing in on Mari's sister, Eri, give the sense that something otherworldly is happening. Eri has been stuck in a sort of 'Sleeping Beauty' state, doing nothing much more than sleeping for the past couple of months. While that is strange in and of itself, the narration places us directly in the room with her as a silent observer.

"Unfortunately (we should say), there is nothing we can do for Eri Asai. Redundant though it may sound, we are a sheer point of view. We cannot influence things in any way." (185)

There's not a lot that happens in this novel, in fact, the small instances that happen to either Mari or Eri are greatly magnified. However, that isn't to say that the moments aren't written beautifully. There's a lot of events left open for interpretation and I would say that in fact, nothing comes to a sound conclusion.