Tokyo After Dark
It seems strange, especially knowing Murakami’s predilection towards the surreal and bizarre that reading one of his novels feels a bit like putting on an old, familiar t-shirt. The way he lets you slip comfortably into his world, the measured and precise revelation of the surreality just feels comfortable. After Dark is no exception to this, though it certainly does do some new and unusual things for a Murakami novel, just in a very comfortable way, even while deliberately trying to make the reader uncomfortable.
There’s a stylistic leap in this novel for Murakami. After Dark is the first of his many novels to be written in a third-person narration, albeit a third-person who acts very much like a first-person, speaking directly to the reader. “Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair,” starts the second line of the book. This third-person, omniscient (yet personable) narrator is necessary for the story’s structure, peering into the lives of four denizens of a single Tokyo night, and told in real-time.
The main character is Mari, a college freshman with insomnia, and we mostly follow her as she spends her night, first in a Denny’s, meeting by chance a friend of her older sister’s (who we shall get to in a moment), helping a beaten up Chinese prostitute get help, and talking about life with said friend, Takahashi. Takahashi is up all night rehearsing in a band and flirting/not-flirting with Mari. We see into the life of Shirakawa, an office worker with a dark secret… and then there’s Eri. Eri, Mari’s older sister, an ex-model, is sleeping. She’s been sleeping. She sleeps all the time, and she is where the story gets very odd.
Extremely deep and psychological, After Dark in its 191 pages takes the normally internal narrative of his fiction and successfully spreads it out across the Tokyo night. It has the same level of depth as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, packed into sparing, simple prose that combines elements of film noir with Murakami’s own unique psychology and themes. Even as an admitted fan of Murakami’s work, I’d have to say this is his best, next to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Certainly, it’s a great starting point for anyone new to his writing. Well worth reading.
