Haruki Murakami: After Dark

There was music and silence, companionship and alienation, activity and stillness, violence and peace. It was the best of nights and the worst of nights. Basically, it was just a typical night in author Haruki Murakami’s world.

Two siblings (one beautifully sleeping and the other studiously awake), a businessman, a jazz trombonist, and other characters haunt After Dark. When a Chinese prostitute is attacked by the businessman, the lives of these disparate characters converge over the course of a night.

Murakami’s After Dark is symphonic in the way it draws different elements together, but there’s as much dissonance as harmony when the people collide. The work is cinematic with lots of references to camera angles, and most chapters include songs — “Five Spot After Dark” by Curtis Fuller and “Bomb Juice” by Shikao Suga for example.

At times, the book doesn’t make sense. So what if the story builds toward a decisive event but drops the ball in the latter half? Murakami is good at insinuating rather than articulating. There are no resolutions, no explanations, and certainly no accounting for human motives. Murakami’s silences can be seriously remiss; the businessman who assaults the prostitute claims he did “what he had to do.”

It’s best to approach the book as one would a dream; the meaning is less important than the overall experience. Subplots are dropped, characters vanish, and loose ends are left dangling. Depending on your tolerance for narrative untidiness, you’ll either be left scratching your head or yelling, “Awesome!”

-Rihoko Ueno

After Dark
Haruki Murakami
Hardcover, 208 pages
$22.00, Knopf/Random House
www.randomhouse.com