Recent update
- Oe no Chisato- The Full Moon
- Alaalang Dilim
- A Dream Within A Dream(Edgar Allan Poe)
- Kafka on the Shore(Haruki Murakami)
- South of the Border,West of the Sun(Haruki Murakami)
- The Wind-up Bird Chronicle(Haruki Murakami)
- Norwegian Wood(Haruki Murakami)
- After Dark(Haruki Murakami)
- Audition Film Review
- Piercing(Ryu Murakami)
After Dark(Haruki Murakami)
May 24th, 2009 by heimeai
The complete review’s Review:
After Dark is set in a single night, beginning just before midnight and ending with the sun rising again. Some chance encounters, the intersection of a variety of lives: not much happens in these hours, yet Murakami dangles enough in front of the reader and constantly leaves small questions unanswered (from: what is that book the girl is reading at Denny’s ?) to hold the reader’s attention. Without much obvious progression — a character who has to remember to do some shopping on his way home is about the most goal-oriented of the lot — Murakami nevertheless creates a world of great (and often ominous) possibility and expectation.
The narrator’s presence is sometimes very emphatically put — all the more noticeable because it is not an “I” but a “we”. A reader might bristle at being included in this way, powerless even as s/he’s told: “Our line of sight chooses an area of concentrated brightness and, focusing there, silently descends to it” (since there’s no choice whatsoever for the reader here: the perspective, here and throughout, is pre-determined, with no opportunity for choosing a different locale to light upon …), and so might choose to read the ‘we’ as some sort of omniscient cluster-narrator, the gods who aren’t quite in control. Either way, Murakami is very firm in what he allows (and what he doesn’t). In later scenes, especially around Mari’s sister Eri, the narrator again comes to the fore, and again insists on a particular point of view — even as it is framed as a matter of choice (”We want to check out the interior of that other room directly, with our own eyes”, etc.) and makes it teasingly easy:
It’s not that difficult once we make up our mind. All we have to do is separate from the flesh, leave all substance behind, and allow ourselves to become a conceptual point of view devoid of mass.
The reader is drawn along with this “conceptual point of view”; some perhaps go willingly, but when Murakami puts it this way it’s hard to keep from imagining the alternatives that could be chosen, the other nooks and crannies that could be explored but that “we” are not allowed to …..
At Denny’s trombone player Tetsuya Takahashi, taking a break from an all-night jam session, sits down at Mari’s table. They’ve met before — and he knows her sister, the beautiful Eri. Mari isn’t very open to begin with, but Takahashi doesn’t mind and is glad to lead the conversation, and over the course of the night they’ll meet and talk some more.
It’s Takahashi that also gets her involved in other people’s lives: a Chinese girl is beaten up at a ‘love hotel’, and he sends the manager to Denny’s to ask for Mari’s help, since the girl can’t speak Japanese but Mari is fluent in Chinese.
The novel follows these few threads — including the rest of the night of the man responsible for beating up the Chinese girl — but they’re fairly loosely intertwined. Murakami’s world is one of chance and glancing encounters rather than tightening connexions and clear resolutions. The criss-crossing is as likely to be incidental as head-on: so, for example, the goon-handler of the Chinese girl drives his motorcycle right beside the taxi in which the man he’s looking for is riding — but the moment passes, potential unfulfilled. (The attacker also leaves the Chinese girl’s cellphone in a convenience store, the threatening calls her handlers then make thus going into almost a void — they reach someone (people pick up the phone and answer it) but not the person they want to; it’s like some vast sea of anonymity, yet where everyone is somehow touched by everything that happens.)
One of the issues Mari has is with her sister, the popular and beautiful one in the family, but Eri has her own issues, which only become clearer later in the novel. Several scenes focus on her troubled sleep, but Murakami only fits the pieces together slowly. It’s fairly effective, even in its resolutions, though not all of Murakami’s games around her (and the camera angles he chooses …) convince.
There are many stretches of After Dark which read like they were written by a very young author, trying out different things, unable to stick to one style and approach. It doesn’t speak against the novel, however — indeed, it even gives the book a very youthful freshness. (Murakami has also always been particularly good with younger characters, and that reinforces that feeling here, too: here Mari is 19, her sister and Takahashi not much older, and Murakami again nails the feel of life at that age.)
Much of the night in question feels almost everyday, what happens just as likely to happen any other day “we” might have chosen, and much of the appeal of Murakami’s writing is in how well he conveys what seem like unremarkable scenes. As it turns out, there is more to this evening than most, from it being Takahashi’s last time with the band to Mari’s future (not to mention sleeping beauty Eri …). Murakami doesn’t always seem sure of how best to present the story, but for the most part he does do a very nice job of it.
Appealing, surprisingly resonant.
from:http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/murakamih/afterdark.htm
Posted in Random Book Reviews | | |
