Haruki Murakami’s After Dark: An Ode to Melatonin
After Dark by Haruki Murakami.
Knopf, 2007, 175 pages.
Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin.
The celebrated Japanese writer Haruki Murakami reveals himself to be human with the technically innovative but ultimately unsatisfying novel After Dark.
This short work depicts the interweaving narratives of several late night Tokyo denizens afflicted by insomnia, jazz, and dead-end jobs. Mari is the introverted sister of a local beauty queen who has fallen into an unexplainable deep sleep. Unable to sleep while her comatose sister is in the house, Mari wiles away the hours in a diner and encounters a host of intriguing characters over coffee and sandwiches. There is Takahashi, a jazz hound and sometimes law student, and Kaoru, a tough-talking former female wrestler who runs a love hotel. Meanwhile, a masked man who can move between dimensions hangs in the background, threatening to invoke some horrible fate upon the nighthawks of Tokyo. The stage is set for another riveting Murakami tale.
But it is the ’stage’ that is also the problem. Unlike Murakami’s other works, this novel appears more concerned with form than with story. In many ways it feels like an abandoned script, with actual camera directions describing scenes in detail. “Our viewpoint,” the text reads, “takes the form of a midair camera that can move freely about the room.” The technique has some benefits. For example, because what matters is what the camera ’sees’, the lens tells the reader what is important. Dialogue also comes to the fore, as it would in a stage play or television drama, and is utilized to tease out the underlying plot. But the words often lack any real effect upon the events of the novel, and everything is marred by uncertainty. The meaning of the words and plotline are overly ambiguous to the point of frustration.
Kafka on the Shore (2005) represented Murakami’s first sustained foray into writing in the third person after having mastered his signature deadpan, first person narration. He succeeded so naturally in this effort that it was hard to imagine that he had never written in the third person in a novel before. After Dark pushes further, moving into first person plural narration - the royal ‘we’ - and Murakami deserves praise for the experiment.
In the end, the innovations in After Dark do not allow for the successful joining of its thematic and narrative parts. The book feels unfinished. Themes of insomnia, isolation, and the uncertainty of the night persist, but Murakami has explored these before in a more considered fashion. (The short story Sleep, in the collection The Elephant Vanishes (1994) expresses insomnia more dynamically in twenty or so pages). His strongest writing in this novel emerges when he describes the setting, which he does in more detail than his other works. And he still writes those quirky lines that are very simple, but have never been quite put that way before: “The lavish morning light washes every corner of the world at no charge.”
Murakami remains my favorite author. His books A Wild Sheep Chase (1989), Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991), and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1997) expanded possibilities in fiction. He deserves to win the Nobel Prize. Yet unless he sews together the frayed strands of After Dark with a sequel, far better to delve into the remainder of his nearly flawless catalog of fine prose.
After Dark may be full of insomniacs but take yourself a few melatonin and get into bed. There’s no need to lose any sleep over this one.
–Deji Olukotun
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