Just Another Murakami Day (or Night)

by

Andi Miller

I seem to have a knack for picking books that are ridiculously difficult to review. First it was You Must Be This Happy to Enter: Stories, by Elizabeth Crane, and now it’s Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. In both cases I found plenty of redeeming goodness in the authors’ work, but in both cases I also had a number of quibbles. I have far fewer quibbles with Murakami’s novel than I did with Crane’s short story collection, but it is no less difficult to articulate what it is I love and what it is I find problematic. I suppose I feel far less inept at my difficulty in reviewing After Dark simply because Murakami’s writing continually defies categorization given its rich themes, the slew of allusions to pop culture, and the wash of surrealism that inhabits the book. 

After Dark is Haruki Murakami’s twelfth work of fiction, and it follows his standard themes for the most part. It is full of Japanese youth, lonely people, western pop culture references, and a seemingly obligatory surrealistic glaze. Admittedly, I have only read one other Murakami novel, Norwegian Wood, and while it is generally considered his most straightforward, “normal” book, I can already see a variety of writerly replays in After Dark.

My first reaction to both Norwegian Wood and After Dark was “Gosh this is so prettily written and readable.” Given all the hoo-hah that generally accompanies Murakami’s work—whisperings about magical realism and universal weirdness—I am continually shocked by its normality, interspersed with flashes of strangeness. After Dark is set in Tokyo between the hours of midnight and dawn, and the players seem quite normal at first. Nineteen-year-old Mari likes to read alone in Denny’s. A jazz musician, Takahashi, carries on conversations with Mari and seems interested in her, but he courted her beautiful sister some years before. A female former wrestler runs a “love hotel” where a young prostitute is beaten. A businessman works all night to avoid his home life. The characters themselves are not extraordinary until their lives begin to entangle together and bits of the unreal seep in. While Mari, Takahashi, and the others scurry around Tokyo in the night, Mari’s sister, Eri Asai is sleeping. Eri is the catalyst for the bulk of the magic in After Dark; she is not simply sleeping the night away, she has been sleeping for months on end. The food her parents bring to her room disappears, but no one can catch her awake.

One quality that sets the book apart from most other contemporary novels I have read lately is the narration. A collective “we” watches the action from above, as if hovering over the night’s events and commenting on occasion. It is much like watching an art house film with a voiceover. The tale unfolds slowly, building, oddities popping up, lurking in shadows. As the reader and narrator hover over Eri Asai’s bed to watch her sleep, the television in her room springs to life. The snowy screen slowly takes on the form of a man in a translucent mask watching from the other side. Later in the novel, Eri Asai is transported to the other side where the man watches her sleep. She wakes up when the man is gone and realizes she too can stare through the television back into her own world.

In another odd turn of events, several of the characters find themselves staring into mirrors, evaluating their own lives and appearances. Once they leave the mirror, the “we” narrator informs us that the reflections remain, staring after the characters and looking around from the other side. Whatever that other side might be.

Murakami never brings any closure to the odd events of the novel. The action vacillates between the mundane and the extraordinary creating a supremely unsettling landscape of uncertainty. Perhaps that constitutes the point. In our everyday realities the mundane and the extraordinary collide at the most inopportune times, throwing us off balance and leaving us haunted. For example, in the case of Eri Asai, once she crosses over into the world of her television the man in the transparent mask—or the Man Without a Face as he is referred to in the novel—watches her for a bit, disappears, and Eri wakes up. She spends a good deal of time looking scared and pondering how on earth she got out of her room to the “other side,” but Murakami never sheds any direct light on the incident. In a later chapter, Eri magically appears back in her room, sleeping peacefully as if nothing ever happened. The reader is left to wonder if she will remember the incident, if it affected her in any way, and its overall purpose. It is a peculiar and troubling incident that the reader must puzzle out and toil over to reach any type of conclusion as to its purpose in the overall scope of the novel.

As a new Murakami reader, I enjoy uncovering the themes that seem universal to his work. Japanese youth searching for normalcy in an ever-industrialized, technological world are constantly confronted by the oddities that go along with a contemporary existence. Murakami has often been criticized for including too many western references in his novels, but that characteristic constitutes another abiding theme—the world contains little individuality on the surface. Countries overlap into one another, cultures begin to melt and meld together, and the bulk of individuality lies within individuals, not groups or geographical locations. In essence, Murakami’s work is another example of America’s overwhelming worldwide pop culture influence. It is unsurprising to catch multiple American musical references, restaurant names (Denny’s for one), and other pop culture tidbits strewn through his work. The world in which Murakami’s characters function is highly homogenized—short on traditional Japanese culture but heavy on individual character quirks. It is a shining example of the very real way in which individuals remain interesting and unique even when the world around them dissolves into sameness.
 
My biggest quibble with After Dark is that it does recycle so many of the usual themes and literary devices with which Murakami is comfortable. It reads like music, an incredibly fast read. But all of the looping together of the plot lines, characters, and the touches of weirdness seem like just another day for Murakami. I am interested to see if some of his most highly regarded works like Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle handle similar issues in more interesting or innovative ways.

Despite my questions, I find I am excited to read more from Haruki Murakami. He provides plenty of material to chew over and explore for this burgeoning fan, and I feel sure there is more to discover in his previous works and in the ones to come.


Andi is a recovering university academic employed by the North Carolina community college system as an English instructor. While she decided to forego a Ph.D. and career as a professor, she fills in all the free time her current position affords her with editing literary publications, reviewing, freelancing, and blogging at Estella’s Revenge. Her work can be found in the journal, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), and Altar magazine as well as online in various venues such as PopMatters.com. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), and writes fiction. Her turn-ons include new books and gelato, while her turn-offs are reality television and washing dishes. Contact Andi Miller.