After Dark (Vintage International) by Haruki Murakami Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of After Dark (Vintage International)
Book Review: Murakami misdirection
Summary: 4 Stars
Haruki Murakami is a master at meaningful misdirection, which makes him something of a kind of magician on the page. Elements present themselves to create a kind of supernatural mystery. For example: early on in this book, an unplugged television presents the darkened image of a man watching the sleeping figure in the bedroom beyond. Naturally, such an image is out to create a driving curiosity in the reader--a curiosity to find out who this person is, what power is at work here.
But, as the seasoned Murakami reader might soon realize, mysteries like this often go unresolved in his books. Murakami's characters are often at the whim of grander powers that they will never understand nor control. Instead, they must learn to live under the thumb of such powers. It all sounds like a kind of existentialism, but Murakami's characters are suprisingly casual in this position.
This novel is an exploration of night dwellers, those who exist after midnight, when the trains no longer run and those stuck in the city have to wait until dawn for release. Whether they are managers of love hotels who once had profitable careers as professional wrestlers, or Chinese prostitutes, or those who like to beat up Chinese prostitutes, or young students who like to practice their trombones in all-night jam sessions, these are all people with pasts, with stories that darken their shadows just a little bit more. The story revolves around Mari Asai, a young girl who has always felt a far second from her sister, Eri, who is a model. But Eri has been asleep for two months, so Mari likes to spend her nights at a Denny's, reading books.
From this Denny's, Mari encounters most of the other odd characters of this book, characters who have stories to tell and histories to relate, advice to give. They come across not as people scared of the powers that hold sway over them, but of people trying to get through their day-to-day existence, no matter how messy that existence can get at times. Like a lot of Murakami books, Mari and Takahashi are characters searching for connection, maybe even searching for emotion itself. The scenes and dialogue are very organic and natural, interspersed with little reminders that something more powerful is at work, something mysterious that may never be resolved, but hopefully the characters will find their own resolutions within the realm of forces they will never understand, though they may leave their own reflections behind in mirrors.
Though not one of the more compelling Murakami books because of a rather seemingly loose set-up and beginning, and there were times that I was a little dubious of Jay Rubin's translation choices, _After Dark_ has a satisfying conclusion and a smooth read throughout. Perhaps this was Murakami enjoying the kind of conversational tones he got to present in Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche in his interviews of the victims of the Tokyo Sarin attacks, where tuna fish and jazz history is a more prevalent point of conversation than the mysterious power that steals people's reflections.
Book Review: Don't be afraid of the Dark! This is still a great book.
Summary: 4 Stars
I wanted to give the book five stars, but I just couldn't because when I compare it to the Wind-Up Bird and Kafka, even to Hardboiled Wonderland, I can't say honestly that the book is five stars (I consider the above books to be the Murakami books).
If you are new to Murakami and are wondering about how drastic his style changes are in this book, and whether that is affecting his writing negatively, I would say no. I have read all of his books, and the core elements of Murakami's genius-- the bizzare, almost psychotic, elements that occur in in the midst of people leading terribly mundane lives still remain, and works here just as well as it does in any of his other books. His new style of narrative isn't too different from Kafka on the Shore (where he used the third person for the first time). He takes great pains to make his prose self-conciously catchy, through the use of repitition of words and key phrases, because the book is short, I felt as though it worked. Sometimes he "sets the scene" too much, and you get the sense that he is describing some elements of a scene just because he has to. Although it certainly doesn't hurt the story.
As a fan, having read so many of his other books written in the first person, I almost don't want him to change, or at least, hope he doesn't give up writing first person like he used to. But the book is very good. My only problem is that the book was short. It was quite good, and I really wanted more. If people have criticised people of Murakami for not having control over his stories; After Dark reflects a writer very much in control of his plotting.
Book Review: Reflections from the ether from one of modern fiction's most unique voices...
Summary: 4 Stars
When using adjectives to attempt description of a Murakami novel, the same words seem to drift to the surface of most reviews: dreamlike, ethereal, Kafka-esque, and the like. All of these terms can lose their effectivness from overuse, so I will attempt to refrain from any further mention of these depictions throughout the remainder of my reflections here. Just rest assured that while these terms may be absent, they still apply to Murakami's latest, "After Dark."
In this striking new work, two sisters exist in parallel realities, one sleeping her life away for reasons that are never entirely clear, while the other goes on an odyssey of discovery that takes her into the night life of her city, encountering a host of memorable characters along the way.
As with other Murakami novels, the plot is never so crucial to the reading experience as the language and the imagery. "After Dark" has the latter two areas covered in impressive style, leaving the reader spellbound by the journey, even if we are never always sure what is driving the narrative.
If you have been a fan of Murakami's other works (my personal favorite is "Kafka on the Shore") then you will find reviews an unecessary motivation to seek out the latest from one of Japan's finest.
If you are unitiated to the world of Murakami, "After Dark" is as good a place to start as any, and will likely drive you to seek out some of his other works as well. You will not be disappointed if you do.
- S.
Book Review: strangely involving and a good read
Summary: 4 Stars
I have really enjoyed several of Murakami's books --none more than the last one, Kafka on the Shore which I thought was brilliant. And I was on a roll in my introduction to his work with The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Woods and South of the Border. He is,simply put, a highly imaginative story teller. This is a small book told almost in real time but it gets you quite involved and it is like you are there -- experiencing this brief nocturnal episode along with the characters that Murakami introduces you to... Book Review: Riffing in the Wee Small Hours
Summary: 5 Stars
Books don't come with sound tracks, but if they did, there's no doubt that trombonist Curtis Fuller's breathy opening notes in "Five Spot After Dark" would be the perfect entree to Haruki Murakami's AFTER DARK. Low-key piano, soft drums and high hat played almost entirely with brushes, and a haunting solo trombone create the perfect noir accompaniment for Murakami's seven-hour, overnight jaunt through a Tokyo of lost and lonely souls. It is a Tokyo that seems about as un-Japanese as anyone could possibly make it - with a small leap of the reader's imagination, this story could have taken place just as easily in New York, London, Paris, or any other large, modern city.
The story line of AFTER DARK hardly seems important. Suffice to say that the author introduces a small cast of characters who suffer the loneliness of urban nighttime existence and yet manage to interact witth and rely upon one another in unpredictable ways. There's Tetsuya Takahashi, the trombone-playing band member out for the last time for an all-night practice session with his band before hoping to return to school to study law. Then there's Mari Asai (an anagram for Asia?), also a college-age student of Chinese language with her textbook in an all-night Denny's, sitting quietly alone until joined by Takahashi. And there's Kaoru, former professional wrestler and now part of the clean-up crew at a seedy love hotel named Alphaville. And Guo Dongli, a Chinese prostitute who gets beaten up in the Alphaville and is assisted by Kaoru with Mari acting as translator. And another night bird, the programmer Shirakawa, who toils away fixing his company's software in an otherwise empty office and who also happens to be Guo Dongli's assailant. Finally, there's Eri Asai, Mari's stunningly beautiful older sister who has been asleep, but not in a coma, for two months.
Chapters of AFTER DARK that follow the night's events (each is labeled by the hour and minute at which it begins) are interspersed with Twilight Zonish scenes of Eri Asai asleep in her room. We watch her as though we are a camera slowly panning the room, reducing us in Murakami's parlance to a mere point of view. Eri's TV mysteriously turns itself on, gradually revealing another watcher, the Man with No Face. Over the course of the night, Eri is magically pulled into the room inside the television and then released, but not before revealing an inexplicable connection to the prostitute-beating programmer Shirakawa and finally offering a sense of resolution between the estranged sisters Mari and Eri.
In a book riddled with weird events and odd connections, a major clue has to come from the love hotel, Alphaville. Jean-Luc Godards 1965 film of the same name was an avant garde masterpiece, a work of futruristic science fiction shot without special effects in the back streets of Paris. In Godard's future, Alphaville is run with ruthlessly efficient logic by a massive Alpha 60 computer. Pictures of the machine's inventor, Vonbraun, are everywhere - he is the new god of Alphaville, to the extent there can be one. In Godard's futuristic city, there is no place for emotion (a man who cries over his wife's death is eliminated), and even love is reduced to its barest mechanics. Language is controlled through "the bible," actually a dictionary of permitted words that is continually revised and simplified. Yet the citizens of Alphaville are supplied to excess with their material needs. Into this fascistic mixture comes an Outsider, Lemmy Caution, and through his eyes, we witness a battle for love, the power of free will, and the triumph of personal conscience.
Perhaps the indirect allusion via Alphaville to the German rocket scientist Werner Von Braun is a clue to Murakami's Man with No Face. That was the name given by Western agencies to the quite real Markus Wolf of the Stasi, the East German secret police, a man who harbored the international terrorist Carlos the Jackal and provided terrorist training to the PLO. Then again, the faceless man in the TV could be a riff on Procul Harem's song, "In the Wee Small Hours of Sixpence." In that song, which takes place among "the remnants of the evening," the faithful but rusty old retainer "may have once been just as we are and now has no face at all." Still as the song declares, his blunted sword is sharp enough, and so may it be with us. Who besides the author can truly say?
Leave it to Mr. Murakami to blend elements of American jazz, French cinema, and American commercialism (Denny's and 7-Eleven) with the peculiar formality and structure of Japanese society. AFTER DARK as a jazzy riff on commercialization, modern technology, alienation, and the loss of souls could be a commentary on Japan or equally on the industrialized West, or the modern technological world in general. Who else but Murakami would have an abandoned cell phone sitting on 7-Eleven shelf, spouting vague threats of "You probably think you got away with it" and "You can run, but you'll never get away" to any hapless shopper who responds to its plaintive rings? And how many of us would react by thinking that the message was indeed intended for us, that the call was not just a random accident of chance? While some readers will no doubt differ in their judgments, I found AFTER DARK to be Murakami at his teasing, infuriating, intellectually subversive best.