Haruki Murakami: After Dark, Knopf, 2007 (Japanese Edition, 2004,
translated by Jay Rubin)
There is one thing I’m absolutely certain I have in common with Haruki Murakami - a love of music. We don’t love the same music, that’s true, but we are both clearly nutsoid about music. Every book the guy’s written is rife with references to music. I love that about him. Even though I think his music taste is more pedestrian than Paris Hilton’s taste in timed histrionics.
After Dark, the latest novel by one of the world’s greatest writers, is Murakami’s clearest effort to write a screenplay to date - an attempt to bridge the gap between the previously surreal, bizarre (and, hopefully, unfilmable) worlds created in his previous works, and the immediate, here-and-now language of cinema. Of course, he still stays true to his nature, with elements of the surreal interspersed with a curiously third-person view of the action, such as it is, but it would be so easy to shoot. It certainly does not tax the imagination to think that the script has already been optioned, shot and put into post-production even as I type this brief review.
In reaching out, through the narrative, to the reader so directly, Murakami loses a bit of his magic, the emotional connection of the disorienting narrative of previous works. This novel, his slightest full novel, is not much more than a beefed-up short story, and, as such, you can feel that he deliberately toned down the surrealism, the digressions, the journeys out of the story, as well as the at times devastating feeling of menace and loss that fills some of this other work. It feels as though he is deliberately demonstrating the effortlessness of storytelling - a literary cousin of war Kong Wai’s “Chungking Express,” then. Not that there’s no art to such a light creation - it’s just that it’s so out of character.
The plot centers on two Japanese sisters, one in a self-induced, pseudo-coma, the other refusing to sleep. The awake sister, Mari, is studious, and while pretty, not as pretty as her gorgeous sister, Eri, who, we are told, is high-strung, high-maintenance, and voluntarily comatose to avoid something - we don’t know what. There’s some folderol about something watching her through the television, a la the ring, but it’s so patently stupid and so quickly abandoned that it’s barely worth insulting here and leaving behind.
But we haven’t met Eri, yet. The opening of the book sweeps, as a camera, through Tokyo, to an all-night restaurant, where Mari sits, alone, reading. Murakami drops references to western culture left and right (Hall and Oates, Percy Faith, Mick Jagger, Eric Claption, Curtis Fuller, Burt Bacharach, Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townsend; she’s in a Denny’s, wearing a red sox ball cap), before we have a chance to catch our breath. A former acquaintance, who knows her because of his long-past liking for her sister, sits down, orders food, and begins talking to her against her will.
Already we are at a departure for Murakami. The novel is third person, clearly through a point-of-view camera lens, watching the action. He deftly guides us, narrating our navigation through the landscape to where we are, and describing where we’re watching. This is not an emotional landscape the camera crawls through - it is real, and we can sit back and watch, or look away. The book is timed - each chapter with a time signature, further adding to the narrative structure and aiding a hapless director in building his or her film of the book.
And herein lies one of the core problems of this novel. For 100 pages, he piles on the new locations and characters - a love hotel and its staff; a Chinese prostitute and her pimp; an abusive john and his wife - until he runs out of introductions and gets back to the work of advancing the plot. This, this is where the book falls short.
I’m not saying that I expect a plot-boiler, a page-turner, an action-packed, rock-em-sock-em barn-burner from Murakami. But here, this plot feels so slight, the rising action moving towards something real, in interesting directions on several fronts, but then, suddenly, backing away, as though he realizes he’s bitten off too much. he ends up only resolving roughly two-fifths of the problems he sets before us, as though he’s forgotten about the rest, or simply dismissed it as too long, too difficult. Or he’s figured out that any more details on the sub-plots would run the movie version over two hours.
in the end, we’re left with a delicious morsel of a book up to this point - some of the most exquisite writing (can I say that about a translation without ever having read a word of the original?) produced today; fantastic shifts of location and time, between reality and unreality with no need to feel which is which, since either might have life or death decided within them. But then he narrows his focus on the two main characters, with only one other character substantively adding to the narrative, and the other important one in a semi-coma, before the novel abruptly shutters to an emotionally unconvincing halt.
Ultimately, it’s a piece that sits comfortably on the shelf next to his short stories, but pales in comparison with his novels. I’m left with questions, but not the kind of questions that should be left at the end of the story. I love the European tradition of leaving things unspoken, untold, unsaid, especially in cinema. But when you get the feeling that the author just didn’t think it all through? Didn’t spend the time finishing the whole, and then maybe cutting back on the bits that resolved all the potential plotting but didn’t advance the core story, and publishing that?
No, I get the feeling that he didn’t deliberately pare down a longer work into something essential, stripped-down and perfect. instead, we’re left with subplot and extra characters that add nothing except a big question mark as to why they’re in there in the first place, if he had no intention on taking them any further. Deus ex machina, but why? What did they add? He’s better than this, honest, he is!
And, in case you’re wondering, a careful re-reading doesn’t bring any answers except, well, next time, just write a bloody screenplay and be done with it.
