Haruki Murakami’s new novel After Dark is rife with all of the themes and questions most prevalent in his other works, so that reading the pages feels like a walk down a familiar and favorite path. There is an unplugged television that sucks a sleeping girl into its silent, enclosed world, calling to mind the television with a life of its own in the story “TV People” in Murakami’s short story collection, The Elephant Vanishes. There is the blurring of the lines between consciousness and unconsciousness for the main character’s sister, Eri Asai, who has been asleep for two solid months, that mirrors the mystery and power of the subconscious as evidenced in Toru Okada, the main character in one of Murakami’s most epic works, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. And of course, as with most of Murakami’s works, the deep and dark night is as much a character itself as any of the living, breathing humans who inhabit the pages.
The novel begins as evening falls with a young woman reading at a table at Denny’s. We soon find out she is Mari Asai when a young musician comes in for a warming coffee before his all-night band rehearsal begins. The young musician is Takahashi, a friend of Mari’s sister Eri. After a brief conversation in which Mari is markedly unresponsive, Takahashi goes on his way and the events of the night are set in motion.
The story takes place in real time, and the hours are ticked off at the beginning of each new chapter with a black-and-white clock and with the time given in numerals below the icon. As might be expected from Murakami, stranger and stranger events unfold in direct concert with the deepening hours of the night. The story is told in a plural first person point of view that feels alternately awkward and welcoming. At times the reader feels as one with the narrator, with all the power that implies. At other times, however, the perspective feels pedantic or condescending. The perspective is most notably employed when the narrator describes the actions (or inactions) of solitary characters, namely Eri and a nameless man who beats a prostitute, steals her clothes and bag, then goes calmly back to his office, works out and travels serenely home to his wife, disposing of the evidence and buying a carton of soy milk en route.
Murakami’s novel cycles between the bedroom of the achingly beautiful sleeping Eri Asai and the active antics of her sister Mari. In the course of the evening, Mari’s services are required to translate for a Chinese prostitute who has been badly beaten and left without clothing in one of Tokyo’s “love hos,” as they are referred to in the novel. The young Chinese immigrant reminds Mari of herself and of her sister. After the prostitute is cleaned up and whisked away on the back of her pimp’s motorcycle, the sleepless Mari stays at the love hotel for several hours, and she is even able to fall asleep there for a brief while. She is awoken when Takahashi calls her on her cell phone.
As the night slowly ends, Mari and Takahashi walk together and talk, each revealing something of their past and present lives. At novel’s end, Mari is back at home, pressed against the warm body of her sister who is still lost in the depths of deepest sleep.
I tore quickly into this novel, looking forward to settling into a strange and complex world peopled by characters who could inhabit others’ dreams or walk through walls as in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, or by characters who could talk to cats or enter an alternate universe by picking up a heavy stone made suddenly light as in Kafka On the Shore. But the novel was over almost as soon as it was begun. I formed no lasting attachment to the characters, and although the book asks plenty of unanswered questions, they seem closer to flat, academic queries than to the vital metaphysical questions about life and love and the workings of the mind and heart that wend their ways through the pages of Murakami’s more epic works. After Dark seems much closer to Murakami’s short stories, which offer glimpses into an alternate, magical world where the rules of regular life do not apply. In After Dark, then, instead of becoming immersed in a labyrinthine world where awake and dreaming meld, where dark and light somehow exist together, where there is a complete break from normalcy, this book skims the surface of that strange world, opening up now and again to reveal the cavern that could be there, just underfoot, but staying always somehow above ground.
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