After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Murakami’s ‘After Dark’ takes place over the course of seven hours during an autumn night in Tokyo. From midnight to dawn, this novel follow five lost souls: a woman in a quasi-comatose state; a jazz musician at an all night practice session; a prostitute assaulted at a “love hotel”; a salary man working late on a software project; and a 19-year old girl looking to escape from the tension of her strained home life. Before the sun rises, each of these stories will intersect with the others.
Murakami has long been admired for his depiction of the isolation and loneliness of modern Japanese life. Likewise, ‘After Dark’ focuses on a similar theme of Japanese youths struggling to reconcile their ideals with the stultifying conformity of the surrounding culture. This novel evokes a ‘dream world’ ambiance. People disappears into television sets, or find that their image remains in the bathroom mirror even after they have left the room.
Murakami focuses, in his words, on “the secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light,” a time when “no one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out.” Much of the power of his stories comes from the paradoxical quality of their settings, which at one moment seem intensely realistic, but the next instant have veered off into a mysterious alternative world.
The book starts in a Denny’s cafe, and along the way it visits a 7-Eleven convenience store, check out TV shows, and listen to rock and jazz music. But these are all part of Murakami’s elaborate set-up. Like ‘South of the Border, West of the Sun’, the moments of normalcy never last long in his narratives. After Dark is a potent and disturbing work. In this novel, Murakami reminds us that the essence of horror in the post-modern narrative is not some gothic extravagance, but the realities that await us outside our doorstep.
Before I end of this book review, let me leave you to ponder upon my favourite paragraph from this novel…
“Someday you’ll find the right person, Mari, and you’ll learn to have a lot more confidence in yourself. That’s what I think. So don’t settle for anything less. In this world, there are things you can do only alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount” - After Dark, Murakami
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