Latest Murakami Novel Explores Hours Between Dusk and Dawn

Haruki Murakami’s latest book is a deceptively slim offering. Every aspect of its scope is limited, from the page count (just under two hundred generously spaced ones), to its timeframe (the seven hours between midnight and daybreak). Despite these restrictions, Murakami has loaded layer upon layer of meaning into the slim volume, making “After Dark” at once a metaphysical reflection on the modern consciousness, an intimate portrait of night and its psychological spaces, and an urban update to a traditional fairy tale.

The novel begins just before midnight, as the tenacious Takahashi enters a nondescript Denny’s on the outskirts of Tokyo. A chatty trombone-playing university student, he soon spots Mari, a reserved teenager on a nocturnal escape from her quiet home. The gradually aligning hands of the clock usher in a new date as Takahashi sits down at Mari’s solitary booth, while elsewhere in the city, Mari’s beautiful older sister Eri sleeps her way into oblivion.

The narrative of “After Dark” centers around these two sisters, and as the hours pass, the night brings with it a host of increasingly bizarre characters. Mari meets Kaoru, a former female wrestler turned love hotel manager, whereas slumbering Eri’s fate is in some way connected to that of a chilling and unfeeling businessman and the harm he inflicts upon a 19-year-old Chinese prostitute.

Somehow, the paths of these strangers are all intertwined. When they meet, Murakami’s brisk and natural dialogue dominates the text, with little posturing on the part of the narrator inserted within. But between these encounters, Murakami’s narrator completely consumes the novel’s direction, resulting in intense, voyeuristic passages in which the perspective of the reader and the narrator seem to converge (“We allow ourselves to become a single point of view, and we observe her for a time”).

These episodes of concentrated, surveillance-like observation stand in stark contrast to the capacity for empathy and understanding that Mari, Eri, Takahashi and Kaoru all display at various points in the text. Although they are often aloof and shuttered in their interactions with one another, it is this promise of intimacy that sustains the novel through its precise exploration of internal psychic spaces.

But Murakami also accomplishes his most penetrating probes of the limits of consciousness in these passages, folding dizzying layers of meta-reality back upon themselves. As the reader and the narrator converge, Murakami puts his trademark distortion of reality on display, passing Eri through a digital pinhole into an alternate video world. A sleeping beauty in the physical world, here, Eri is finally able to awaken, but it’s not to Prince Charming. She is alone, finally completely out of touch with her psyche, in a sterile and frightening space.

As Eri moves in and out of consciousness, Mari moves in and around Tokyo. Like in Murakami’s other novels—”Norwegian Wood,” for example, whose title is a reference to the Beatles song—music is a constitutive figuring device in the story. Mari, Takahashi and Kaoru’s escapades are scored by a soundtrack including Curtis Fuller’s “Five Spot After Dark” and Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady.” In fact, the prominence of Murakami’s references to jazz melodies accentuates the structure of the novel, ebbing and flowing in entrancing bars of refrain.

Finally, “After Dark” is, like all of Murakami’s novels, a story obsessed with characters divorced from their selves. With disarming intimacy and honesty, “After Dark” examines the loneliness from which each character suffers, creating foreign worlds out of the very realities we find most familiar. While the novel’s first impression won’t be overwhelming, like the jazz melodies that it structures itself after, “After Dark” is a book that rewards rereading and further contemplation, ultimately finding its redemption in the warmth that lingers in the absence of human contact.

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