So it’s not entirely unexpected when the television in Eri’s bedroom springs to life of its own accord, a man with no face takes shape on the fuzzy screen, and pretty soon Eri gets sucked into a parallel universe inside the TV. And characters often seek to connect to an alternate universe to try to make sense of the here and now. Otherworldly things often happen in Murakami novels - cats speak, fish fall from the sky, devilish figures appear in human form as Colonel Sanders. And therein lies the trouble with After Dark. They’re all wide awake in dreamland - that is, except for Eri Esai, Mari’s beautiful and troubled sister, who is not only asleep this particular evening, but has been for weeks. There’s Mari Esai, a bespectacled student in a Boston Red Sox cap Tetsuya Takahashi, a scruffy jazz trombone player with a hankering for chicken salad Kaoru, a former female professional wrestler who manages a love hotel, Alphaville, that shares a name with Mari’s favorite Jean-Luc Godard movie and Shirakawa, a cipher of a salaryman for the mysterious Veritech corporation who listens to Scarlatti cantatas while doing situps during his graveyard shift. The rest of the world is asleep, but Murakami’s cast of characters are wide awake amid a Tokyo “amusement district.” In fact, the slim novel could more aptly be titled After Midnight, because all but four minutes of it take place at night after the stroke of 12. To keep up the American pop culture analogy - which seems fitting, since the Japanese novelist operated a suburban Tokyo jazz club before he became a writer, and is just as likely to reference Love Story or Hall and Oates as he is Dostoevsky or Bach - After Dark exists in the same middle-of-the-night netherworld as Martin Scorsese’s 1985 film After Hours. For that, you’ll have to go to either his mind-blowing masterwork, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1998), or the nearly as good Kafka on the Shore (2006).
As such, it doesn’t take in the full breadth of Murakami’s dynamic range. It’s like an understated Bruce Springsteen album that arrives between E Street Band opuses. Haruki Murakami alternates capacious novels that move in and out of the material and Shinto spirit worlds with low-key, quieter meditations that function as philosophical mood pieces.Īfter Dark falls into the latter category.
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