Sun, Jan 06, 2008 page18

• [BOOK REVIEW] 'After Dark's' strangers in the night exchange more than glances

  Haruki Murakami's latest work takes place over a single night in Tokyo and is distinctly poignant and sad while also being brief and inconclusive

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  Haruki Murakami is by now a famous writer. He's someone who knows that whatever he sends to his publisher will certainly be published. Authors in such situations face particular temptations, and certain distinctive challenges.

  First is the temptation to submit something written with less than their maximum power. It will be published anyway, and publishers tend to expect regular material from the best-selling authors.

  But it's also an opportunity for a writer to try out something experimental, a mixture of genres perhaps, a work written in a style, or styles, that wouldn't be considered acceptable from an unknown name.

  

  AFTER DARKBy Haruki Murakami 191 pages Harvill Secker

  After Dark prompts these thoughts while at the same time remaining a relatively entertaining performance. It's concise, both in its actual length (under 200 pages) and in its concerns - the events of a single night. At the same time it raises questions that are never answered, and allows you to luxuriate in a series of atmospheres, but in none of them for very long.

  Two students meet in an all-night fast-food restaurant in Japan. The girl, Mari, who's studying Chinese, can't sleep and is reading a serious book. The boy, Takahashi, is getting ready to jam for the last time with his jazz band before devoting himself full-time to his legal studies.

  Shortly after Takahashi leaves, a determined-looking woman, Kaoru, arrives. There's an emergency involving a young prostitute from China in a love hotel she manages, and Takahashi, dropping by, has told her Mari can speak Chinese. Could she come over and help?

  Meanwhile, in a darkened room Mari's elder and beautiful sister, Eri, is lying asleep, watched over by a Man With No Face from inside the flickering TV set (which has, however, mysteriously been unplugged from the power supply).

  At the love hotel it transpires that a customer has assaulted the young girl from China and left with her money and all her clothes. Kaoru, however, manages to print out the man's image from the security camera, and gives a copy to the girl's menacing minder when he arrives to take her away on his motorbike into his gang's no doubt insensitive care.

  The girl's assailant is revealed as having been Shirakawa, a night-worker in computers who listens while working to the music of Bach and Scarlatti. He eventually takes a taxi home, depositing the girl's clothes in a garbage can on the way, and placing her cell-phone on a shelf in a 7-Eleven.

  Not a great deal happens after this. Takahashi, who met Eri once at a party, tells Mari that she confided in him then that she wanted to get closer to her younger sister. The sinister minder sends the stolen cell-phone threatening voice messages that he hopes will be heard by Shirakawa, but are actually received by a 7-Eleven assistant, and by Takahashi, who has dropped in to buy some milk.

  Mari finally tells Takahashi, who has the makings of a devoted admirer and would-be lover, that she'll soon be leaving for a six-month study course in Beijing. She also tells him about an incident when, as a child, she was trapped with her sister in a darkened elevator, stranded between floors after an earthquake. Near the end of the book she joins her sister in bed, and a silent reconciliation of sorts seems to take place. Shirakawa, it appears, is never tracked down.

  This book is more like music, or perhaps a dream, than the thrilling narrative it promises to become. Murakami would probably argue that it simply contains the events of a night, and that after such a brief period many things remain unresolved, or are often not even understood. Instead of plot resolution he offers poetic images of a modern city at night - empty beer cans, a cat sniffing at a garbage bag, rats, the lights of an all-night convenience store, the reverberation of passing long-

  distance trucks.

  Ever since the incomparable cadences of his South of the Border, West of the Sun (English translation 2000), Murakami has been drawn to mixing the realistic with the bizarre. Here, too, the excellently-drawn scenes in the love hotel, and between Mari and Takahashi, alternate with the sci-fi-like mysteries of the sleeping Eri being watched by the mysterious masked presence (who may in fact be Shirakawa).

  Aspects of modern city life are certainly recognized and incorporated - surveillance, insomnia, casual sex and individual isolation. The search for love, Murakami is perhaps saying, has formidable obstacles these days. Takahashi significantly tells Mari he will write her "a super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel," and the author may be summing up the book's events when he writes, "Mari has made her way through the long hours of darkness, traded many words with the night people she encountered there, and come back to where she belongs."

  Even so, this very readable short novel has to struggle to compare with the classics in the novella genre. This is no Heart of Darkness or Death in Venice. As an evocation of modern life it can't really compare with Michel Houellebecq's grimly sardonic imaginings either. But it does embody Murakami's very distinctive poignancy and sadness (which, however, never descends into melancholy). Murakami fans will snap it up, while others will be disappointed by its brevity and inconclusiveness.

  Nevertheless, After Dark is memorable enough, an evocation of the passing of time not unlike Virginia Woolf's The Waves. It's probably most valuably seen in relation to the Murakami canon as a whole, and best appreciated in conjunction with his other recent part-realistic, part-fantasy creations. The fine English version is notable for its polish and naturalness, and especially its rendering of modern American colloquial speech by Murakami's regular translator, Jay Rubin.
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