Books
Seeing the night
by Jolisa Gracewood
Haruki Murakami tours Tokyo after hours.
All the signature Murakami touches illuminate After Dark, a novella-length riff on the tune that Japan’s most self-consciously international author has been playing for most of his career. The moody city, the pedantic allusions to obscure jazz numbers, the surreal incursions of dream logic, and always the questing loners who have been somehow shaken loose from the social structure, and hover above a pit of despair as they make halting connections with other disaffected souls.
Usually the protagonist is an under-employed middle-aged man, but this time the story follows 19-year-old Mari Esai, who sits alone in a restaurant at midnight reading a book. As the wee small hours tick away – indicated by the neat little clockfaces that serve as chapter headings – Mari’s path will intersect with a number of curious creatures of the night in a corner of an “amusement district” in an unnamed “gigantic metropolis” that we can take to be Tokyo.
There’s Tetsuya Takahashi, a young musician (who wants to be a lawyer); a bleached-blonde former lady wrestler who manages a love hotel; a battered but beautiful Chinese prostitute; and a tightly wound salaryman with a very dark side. By dawn, Mari will negotiate her way home and attempt to repair her tattered relationship with her older sister, Eri, a damaged beauty whose life has become so vacuous that she has all but checked out of it.
The compressed time frame and the nocturnal setting intensify the rather slender set of events that comprise the narrative. You could read this as a murky fairy-tale, in which a plain-Jane heroine is ushered through the forest by various kindly helpers, while a big bad wolf lurks in the shadows and a sleeping beauty awaits rescue from a locked room. The locations – chain restaurants, offices, streets – are generic in a way that enhances Murakami’s prevailing tone, a sort of unplugged, ironic anomie that has served him well in his longer works.
Murakami is showing his age, though, and not in a good way. The tone of After Dark is a bit off; it reads like juvenilia, but dated juvenilia, as if he had dug this out of a drawer and dusted it off. At times, the anachronism is embarrassing, like an old uncle trying to be hip – does anyone wear a Swatch any more? And even with Japanese retromania as a given, would a young jazz musician’s points of reference really be Mick Jagger (mentioned twice), Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend?
Jay Rubin, one of Murakami’s long-time translators, seems off his stride as well, hitting a few bum notes. When Takahashi says, “The spotlight doesn’t suit me. I’m more of a side dish – coleslaw or French fries or a Wham! back-up singer”, he surely means “that other guy from Wham!” The dialogue is unevenly rendered; when Mari reveals she’s a smoker, for example, the gruff lady wrestler offers the highly unlikely comment, “Tell the truth, it doesn’t become you.”
Still, the evocations of the sleeping city are nicely handled. When the trains start running again, those stranded in the city overnight rush to catch “the first trains that will take them out to the suburbs, like schools of fish swimming upstream”. And you have to feel sorry for a translator who has to cope with lazy chapter-ending cliffhangers like “Something is about to happen in this room. Something of great significance.”
The quirky, tweaked realism that Murakami has made his own veers, in After Dark, into the realm of amateurish science fiction. But even as the novel seems oddly sophomoric for such an established writer, some elements make an impression – a slowly budding relationship between two shy night-owls; the opaque, inexplicable civility of a brutal assailant; the makeshift netherworld family who run the love hotel; reflections that linger spookily on a mirror’s surface long after the viewer has turned away; and the final image of two sisters embracing, in a tender, long-desired yet barely acknowledged reconciliation.
In the end, After Dark is just not dark enough. If you want the real Murakami flavour, go back to his earlier work, the haunting Norwegian Wood, or the baggy but brilliant The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Like the “American coffee” served up in Japanese cafés, which is simply a very watered-down version of the daily brew, this slight novella is a pallid ghost of the real thing.
AFTER DARK, by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker, $34.99).
