Haruki Murakami
AFTER DARK
Translated by Jay Rubin
208pp. HarvillSecker. £15.99.
978 1 8465 5047 8

We meet the heroine of After Dark in a late-night diner, somewhere in a large Japanese city. The diner is described first. The “unremarkable but adequate lighting”, the “expressionless decor and tableware”, the “innocuous background music at low volume”:

"Everything about the restaurant is anonymous and interchangeable. And almost every seat is filled.
After a quick survey of the interior, our eyes come to rest on a girl sitting by the front window. Why her? Why not someone else? Hard to say. But, for some reason, she attracts our attention – very naturally. She sits at a four-person table, reading a book. Hooded gray parka, blue jeans, yellow sneakers faded from repeated washing . . . . Little makeup, no jewellery, small, slender face . . . . Every now and then, an earnest wrinkle forms between her brows."

Gradually, more details about the girl’s late-night vigil are revealed. Her name is Mari, she is in her first year at college specializing in Chinese, and there is trouble at home. With no warning, her elder sister has dropped out of normal existence. Two months earlier, the beautiful Eri declared that she was “going to go to sleep for a while”, and has not woken up.

Mari reads her mysterious book with concentration, but keeps being interrupted. Her first visitor is an old friend of her sister’s. Tetsuya Takahashi, a law student and trombonist, is taking a break from an all-night jamming session to grab a chicken salad. The second is Kaoru, a former female pro-wrestling champ, who runs “Alphaville”, the local Love Hotel. It transpires that a man has brutally attacked a Chinese woman in one of the hotel rooms, and nobody can understand what has happened. Having heard that Mari speaks Chinese, Kaoru calls on her as translator. Meanwhile, Haruki Murakami’s imperious narrative voice moves between areas of the city, zooming in on Mari’s world, on that of her sister, and, finally, on the office of a computer programmer named Shirakawa.

Much of this is familiar Murakami territory. From the details given in the novel, it appears that Shirakawa is the perpetrator of the crime in Alphaville. As for the connections between the other narrative strands, they are left loose. Various reasons could be mooted for Eri’s extended nap. A model, she was living a highly pressured teenage existence, “insanely busy, taking a million lessons”. One could see her somnolent state as a case of hikokomori – a sort of sleeping sickness currently common among depressed Japanese teenagers. However, like so many of Murakami’s sleepers, there seems be something more uncanny than physiological going on. As the narrative voice puts it, “we gradually come to sense that there is something about her sleep that is not normal. It is too pure, too perfect”:

"We allow ourselves to become a single point of view, and we observe her for a time. Perhaps it should be said that we are peeping in on her. Our viewpoint takes the form of a midair camera that can move freely about the room . . . . Her eyelids are closed like hard winter buds. Her sleep is deep. She is probably not even dreaming . . . . Her slender white neck preserves the dense tranquillity of a handcrafted product. Her small chin traces a clean angle like a well-shaped headland. Even in the profoundest somnolence, people do not tread so deeply into the realm of sleep. They do not attain such a total surrender of consciousness . . . . This is all we can conclude for now."

Soon, even more abnormal things happen. The television in the corner of Eri’s bedroom starts to behave bizarrely. The set is unplugged, but it begins to flicker. A picture appears on its screen, of a masked man. This “new intruder” in the television is “neither quiet nor transparent. Nor is it neutral. It is”, the narrator tells us, “undoubtedly trying to intervene”.

The figure in the television is not the only piece of interference. Throughout the novel, the reader notices something both intrusive, and newly “interventionist” about the narrative voice itself. On a formal level, by using the third person plural, Murakami captures the reader and draws them into a “single point of view”. But there is also the suspicion of a sustained social critique. Nearly ten years ago, Murakami wrote a book about the poisonous sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Underground, perpetrated by the members of a religious cult. In the book he argued that while the followers of “Aum” had a distorted view of the world, the philosophy offered by mainstream society was no better. The attack, he argued, showed up “the contradictions and weaknesses deep within our social system . . . . What was made clear was the structural routing of ‘our’ system”. “Haven’t we entrusted”, he asked, “some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not that System, at some stage, demanded of us some kind of ‘insanity’? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own?” There have always been elements of Murakami’s fiction that refer to problems and questions in contemporary Japan. References to pop culture have always jostled with reportage and echoes of film noir. However, up to now, one of the strengths of his writing has been that one is never exactly sure what his message has been. In Kafka on the Shore, for example, we can try to work out the relation between a teenage boy, a villain called Colonel Sanders, some large fish falling from the sky and a group of soldiers – but we will only fail. There, as with the labyrinthine workings of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, one may conclude along with Murakami’s hero that the answer may be “something intangible”. Those novels are not so much metaphorical mappings or explorations of any one truth, as explorations of what it might mean to inhabit more than one world at a time.

After Dark, in contrast, seems to offer the reader a clear moral imperative, through the figure of Takahashi. The law student seems to have an opinion on everything, from the different sorts of bathing suits girls wear to the crispness of the toast in the diner. His main gripe, it seems, is with contemporary Japanese society, which he can only describe as “a creature”:

'It takes on all kinds of different shapes – sometimes it’s “the nation”, and sometimes it’s “the law”, and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs but they just keep on growing back. Nobody can kill it. It’s too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is . . . . And this creature, this thing doesn’t give a damn that I’m me or you’re you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.'

His speech about the “creature” is addressed to Mari, but the diatribe also seems intended as a guide to the novel’s centre. This is a novel about the systems of which we form a part, about societal guilt. Takahashi’s account of the facelessness of society chimes, all too neatly, with the figure that watches the sleeping Eri from inside the Sony television, a figure whose “mask fits the face like a second skin”. “We shall call him”, the narrator notes, “the Man with No Face.” And Takahashi spells things out a little too clearly. He is given to raising his index finger in order to emphasize his point – a habit that seems excessive, considering that his remarks are fairly straightforward. (He comes out with sentences like “you just have to live one day at a time”, “people are all different. Even siblings”, and “if you really want to know something, you have to be willing to pay the price”). When it comes to one-liners, Kaoru isn’t much better, leaning towards Mari to ask “what’s a girl like you doing hanging out all night in a place like this?”.)

In the handling of his characters, as with the novel as a whole, Murakami seems to have lost hold of irony. Admittedly, his teenage characters do display it on a small scale. Takahashi makes a joke about why Mari bothers to avoid battery-fed chicken while chain-smoking her way through a packet of Camel Filters. Mari finds herself defining the concept of irony to Kaoru, when she explains the fact that the Love Hotel takes its name from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film: “Cause in Alphaville, you’re not allowed to have deep feelings. So there’s nothing like love. No contradictions, no irony. They do everything according to numerical formulas”. Kaoru listens, but she claims that she doesn’t “really get it”. Neither, in truth, do we. The philosophical discussions in After Dark are deadpan exchanges. There is a sense that we are listening to something, as the narrator puts it, “of great significance”. This is not a novel that wears itself lightly.

Murakami’s vision of adolescent consciousness has always been an acquired taste, but some of the awkwardness here comes from Jay Rubin’s mid-Atlantic translation, which seems variously incongruous or over-egged in its handling of dialogue, as if someone’s father had found himself at an after-party, and was trying to fit in. Teenagers “grab some shut-eye”, talk of their “buddies” and ask each other “Whaddya mean?”.

Murakami is often compared to J. D. Salinger, but his cult-status novel Norwegian Wood relies on the kind of existential musing and soft-focus nostalgia that Holden Caulfield would have seen as “phoney”. In After Dark, Murakami never seems fully to countenance the potential comedy of his characters, or the fact that their discussions fall into a familiar system of their own. This tonal difference must be seen as part of the sensibility of twentieth-century Japanese art, which, from Tanizaki to Anime cartoons, relies on the deadpan and the absurd. But, in the end, nothing about After Dark, and its wide-eyed philosophizing, seems surprising. Perhaps this is because its message is far too clear to be truly bewildering. One wishes Haruki Murakami had left a little more in the shade.

Sophie Ratcliffe is a British Academy Post Doctoral Research Fellow, working on ideas of sympathy and sentimentality. She is working on a selected edition of the letters of P. G. Wodehouse.