On Cities and People in Haruki Murakami's After Dark

A review of After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami’s After Dark is a literary portrait of several characters in Tokyo, Japan, whose lives loosely interweave in the course of one “nocturnal milieu” (as The Guardian perfectly put it)—the somewhat mystical phase bookended by the hours of midnight and dawn. Although points of action in the novel are very limited, you get the typical nonchalant yet quirky style of writing that is often associated with Murakami. So begins the story:

Eyes mark the shape of the city. Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature—or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms.

In the most Murakami-esque way possible, Murakami subtly introduces the major themes of the novel: the detrimental value of time and collectivism. The story starts just right before midnight when the city begins to rest and people retire to sleep. This state of the ordinary might be the case for everyone else but not for some who choose to stay awake during the wee hours of the day, in which boundaries between reality and metaphysics start to blur.

The scene opens at a Denny’s—enter Mari, a young, quiet student accompanied by a cup of coffee, an unnamed book, and the darkness surrounding her. Her reading, then, is later interrupted by the chatty Takahashi, a charismatic trombonist who engages her into a series of philosophical that somehow borders on the existential, yet seemingly casual conversations. Eventually, they are led to observe a crime in a 24-hour love hotel. And fast forward to a few more chapters, they resume their conversation in an after-dark stroll around the place, and then Mari comes back to the love hotel where she finds herself napping at just before the morning began. Chapters alternate between the events of Mari’s whereabouts and somewhere not far away: in her house, where we watch Eri deep in a peaceful slumber… or not? These chapters are where Murakami inserts nuances of magical realism, as we witness Eri travel to this strange, otherworldly dimension which the television apparently provides access to.

Note the irony here, where the eerily strange circumstances are masked by a facade of normalcy—specifically, the murder in a love hotel and the idea of traveling through the dimensions of the unconscious via a television screen during sleep. With Murakami, it’s always a playful balance between real life and the magical, the normal and the peculiar. But he does this nonchalantly: what is unusual is always written in a seemingly ordinary tone as if a Man with No Face watching you sleep through a television screen is completely normal.

After Dark made me think of how interconnected people's lives really are. It's sort of saying: I am here and I exist but so does everyone else around me. In the book, we see several individual characters come together during the “after” hours of dark and it’s extremely climactic to watch their lives intertwine with one another, even just for a limited and temporary amount of time. Murakami even suggests the plurality of the narrator, using “we” and “us” to further involve the reader into the experience. After Dark isn’t just a typical story but a literary canvas made up of the author, the fictional characters, and the reader. It suggests a collective experience both internally and externally and that’s why I find this book to be so beautiful, and possibly one of Murakami’s best works in my opinion.