>>REVIEW
AFTER DARK
Haruki Murakami
Bond Street Books, 208 pp.
Haruki Murakami’s After Dark opens with a cinematic bird’s-eye view of a living city, a throbbing organism that pulsates with life in the embrace of the approaching night. Ostensibly this city is Tokyo, but it could be any of the great, unforgiving cities of the world where the dislocated find a haven in the darkness.
After Dark is the story of an array of characters that inhabit this nocturnal landscape – two estranged sisters living in parallel but opposite worlds, one that cannot sleep, and one that cannot wake; a youthful musician on his way to play his last late-night jazz jam session; a female ex-wrestler and manager of a Tokyo love hotel; a prostitute, enslaved by a local gang, who takes a brutal beating at the hands of a john who seems to inhabit multiple realities; and a motorcycle-riding gang member with a propensity for amputating ears.
A state of nocturnal dislocation is at the very heart of After Dark. Murakami’s works plumb the subterranean depths of human nature. It’s this psychological spelunking that makes his characters reside in your mind long after you first encounter them.
The story opens late at night in a Denny’s, as the main character, Mari, studiously seeking isolation in one of the sketchier parts of town, has a chance meeting with the musician, Takahashi. This meeting draws Mari into a web of events that unfold like a Robert Altman film – random encounters and criss-crossing paths that draw the reader along an interconnected highway that gives a sense of simultaneous and convergent realities.
Interspersed throughout is the mysterious realm in which Mari’s sister, Eri, slumbers. A faceless, alien intelligence that resides in a virtual world seems to stalk the slumbering sister. The power of this faceless man seems to stretch across physical and virtual boundaries to enslave the sleeping sister.
The story is told in a filmic style, an innovation from Murakami’s earlier works. Surrendering his typical first-person perspective, Murakami takes a step beyond the third person, making the reader complicit with the narrator. From the beginning, the author reminds us that we have an omniscient perspective but absolutely no agency as events unfold. It makes After Dark one of Murakami’s most visually descriptive works. Nothing that is not seen on the surface or voiced through a character is revealed. The inner musings or tumults of the players are internalized and only visible through the descriptive narrative. This emphasis on the visual in a literary medium poses a particular difficulty in the development of certain characters. It is impossible to feel anything for the obsessively refined businessman-cum-violent john, Shirakawa. The schizophrenic turmoil implied within this character simply comes across as undeveloped and unresolved. Unlike Shirakawa’s alter ego, the Faceless Man is sinister in his animated stilted state.
Those seeking a nice, tight resolution to the story will be disappointed. The overall atmosphere of After Dark is a blend of smoky jazz haunts, late-night diners and an essential "Japaneseness" that produces a completely self-aware dislocation of characters. It’s a mirroring of the shades of ennui that characterizes a contemporary western culture at odds with its own past.
Murakami’s earlier works, such as the Wind Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore, held a mystery and magic that’s lacking in After Dark. Given the length of the novel and the complexity and innovation in it, it’s perhaps the weakest of the author’s works – like a short story stretched beyond its boundaries into a novella.
Perhaps After Dark represents the breadth of Murakami’s ability to experiment, with the seeming stylistic repetition of his past fictional successes. For the diehard Murakami fan, After Dark may fall short of expectations, but for a reader discovering his work for the first time, After Dark might be the perfect introduction to a contemporary literary genius. |
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