Book Review: "After Dark" by Haruki Murakami

“After Dark”
Haruki Murakami
Alfred A. Knopf
Hardcover ($22.95)
191 pp.

By Matt Elzweig

Like the characters in his latest, brief, novel, “After Dark,” and the fluctuating realities they inhabit, Haruki Murakami is hard to pin down. In one breath, whether through his work or in interviews, he comes across as shy, sensitive and vulnerable, his passions for jazz and rock n’ roll, endearing in their nerdiness. In the next, he seems grandiose. His words start to scrape the borders that separate sincerity from pretension.

In a 2002 Japan Times article, Murakami talks about his commitment to readers. “I answer my readers’ e-mails … I read about 100 per day, and I write 10 to 20 replies … I think it’s very important for me to read the words from my actual readers, the ones who pay money to buy and read my books.” But in that same interview, he makes statements like this one, from a 2005 International Herald Tribune article. “I went to New York myself, found an agent myself, found a publisher myself, found an editor myself … no Japanese novelist has ever done such things.”

He often presents himself as a rebel pitted against the Japanese literary establishment, and when he says, in the Japan Times article, that Japanese critics don’t like him, he’s not kidding. They don’t appreciate his constant references to Western, especially American, pop culture. They hold his unusually straightforward, stripped-down prose in low regard. And probably see his psychodrama as psychobabble, his sentences more like pop lyrics than literature.
Whether he created this controversy or they did, is a good question, and Murakami offers one partial explanation: that due to the popularity of “Norwegian Wood” (1987), his breakout novel, he could never be considered a “literary” author again. “Most critics don’t like bestselling writers … In the West … my books sell very moderately. So readers there think of me as a kind of cult writer,” the way they used to in Japan.

Murakami’s strength is shining the light of his imagination on eccentric characters in dark landscapes, usually urban ones, and pulling everything – the superficial, the practical, the subconscious thoughts – out of their heads to articulate his ideas and questions, and leaving just enough unanswered.

But while his formidable knowledge of and fondness for Western pop culture gives Murakami, the person, a geeky charm, his pop references are transparent and get in the way of the imagery and dialogue, and everything else that makes his books unique. (“Only the area around the man’s desk receives illumination from fluorescent lights on the ceiling. This could be an Edward Hopper painting titled ‘Loneliness.’”) In a book just under 200 pages, these interruptions become more distracting.

The intersection of strangers and the way fate and free will (if you believe in either) egg each other on, both Murakami staples, always have the potential to make for an absorbing read, and this one’s not bad. It’s not great either.

Just before midnight, a young musician named Takahashi walks into a Tokyo Denny’s and sees Mari Esai, the sister of a girl he went on a date with once, and sits down with her. Mari, a student majoring in Chinese, is the awkward brain to her sister Eri’s superficial model.
The scenes, written from the perspective of a camera lens, are undermined by a screenplay treatment-like narration. Murakami could have written them in conventional third person to better effect.

When Eri is introduced, she’s shown, frame-by-frame, trapped in what seems to be some kind of parallel universe.

Eventually, Takahashi leaves the restaurant. But when one of his friends, the manager of a “love hotel,” finds a Chinese prostitute beaten in one of the rooms by an unknown assailant, they bring Mari over to translate. After they identify the attacker, a “salaryman” (or office worker), working late in the area, in a surveillance photo, they give it to the victim’s pimp.

What’s most satisfying about “After Dark” contradicts what is perhaps the Western media’s most common criticism of Murakami, which amounts to a naked emperor argument – that his books are high on vague metaphysics, and atmosphere, but low on substance.

But in this one, he explores an idea he has played with before, that a kind of moral dualism exists – a fluid border between kindness and cruelty, darkness and light. “There really was no such thing as a wall separating their world from mine,” Takahashi explains, remembering defendants in criminal trials he attended as a pre-law student.

“Or if there was such a wall, it was probably a flimsy one made of papier-mâché. The second I leaned on it, I’d probably fall right through and end up on the other side. Or maybe … the other side has already managed to sneak its way inside of us, and we just haven’t noticed.”

Just before three a.m., the salaryman is back at work. He has just beaten up the prostitute and skipped out without paying for her or the room, and is speaking to his wife on the phone; picking up a carton of low-fat milk on the way home will be no problem at all.

In Tokyo, residents talk constantly about when the “big one” is coming – the earthquake equal to or worse than the 1923 earthquake that killed over 100,000 people in the Kanto region. Who knows if earthquakes are the inspiration for Murakami’s often unstable world? But what could be less stable than a chain of islands on four tectonic plates, where change occurs in an instant?

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com