FINAL VERSION Independent Reading Response

 

Independent Reading Response

After Dark by Haruki Murakami is a surreal but serious novel about one Tokyo night and the uncanny and ordinary events that occur around a 19-year old girl that happened to be sitting by the front window of a restaurant called Denny’s.

The novel is narrated in the present tense and the story unfolds in the voice of an unnamed first person narrator referred to as ‘we’. This could be the author as well as the audience or readers and may include spirit-like beings. The main character, Mari, meets a young man called Takahashi in a family restaurant. They recognize each other and begin to communicate. Takahashi leaves to practise in the basement of a nearby building with his band. At the same time, Mari’s sister EriAsai sleeps a deep, heavy sleep from which she has not woken up from for two months. Thirty minutes later, a large woman called Kaoru charges into Denny’s and asks Mari to help her translate for some injured Chinese girl. They leave Denny’s and arrive at a love hotel by the name of ‘Alphaville’. After sorting out the problems there, Kaoru goes to a small bar with Mari and discusses various things, in particular, Kaoru’s life as a professional wrestler and how she came to be a manager of that hotel. Kaoru recommends Mari to stay at ‘Skylark’ until daybreak. She then checks the surveillance camera of ‘Alphaville’. The man who injured the girl at the hotel goes on with his night time office work. At three a.m., Takahashi joins Mari in Skylark and talk about their studies. They leave and feed sandwiches to cats in a tiny park. Mari returns to ‘Alphaville’, where she communicates with a cleaner who works there. Mari sleeps until daybreak. Takahashi accompanies her to the train station and the city gradually wakes up from its darkness.

The central character, Mari, ‘naturally’ attracts the attention of the readers and author of the book. We learn more about her through the extraordinarily different situations she is placed in through the night. By the end of the ordeal, she knows that something has changed. By going out alone in the city at night,she encountered many ‘night people’ and talked with them.Mari went and helped Kaoru clear up the confusion in the hotel. She had the choice of refusing to go. Being able to help others at night shows her bravery. Many ‘night people’ are not as nice as the characters introduced in the novel. Along with those other characters, Mari has an aura of being trustworthy, dependable and slightly different from the overall population staying awake. Other people can relax and talk to her.Her older, very beautiful sister was always compared to her during their youth and people would wonder why two sisters could be so different. Mari grew up thinking that she was ugly and that the only thing for her to do was study hard. Mari wants to become a translator or interpreter. She began studying Chinese in a Chinese school due to being unable to continue at a local Japanese school.

I liked this character because she placed social issues first, talked with all the people she happened to meet during the night boldly and was smart and strong enough to survive the events of the night.She told Takahashi that ‘the chickens they serve in chain restaurants are full of weird drugs’. Together they discussed law and the fact that ‘all human beings are caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness’. Mari also tells Takahashi that ‘mercury builds up in your body if you eat tuna fish’. According to her knowledge, mercury in the body causes ‘heart attacks in your forties’ and ‘losing hair’. She has a strong personality and is a hard worker who built up her self-confidence and overcame hardships on her own, which all help in giving us a reason to naturally admire her.

Although she was sometimes startled or not so active in the beginning of conversations with forgotten friends or strangers, I admire the character and the author’s natural sequence of the dialogue. Skill may not play a large role in writing good dialogue, but good imagination is required. They both talk about their families and realise that there are no choices for some things. People ‘live in different worlds and no matter what someone feels, becoming good friends or maintaining a close relationship with family is sometimes made impossible’. What is possible would be ‘feeling their pain’ or ‘feeling as if they are living inside you or being a part of you’. Together, they come to the conclusion that Eri may be sleeping without waking because she was ‘carrying too many problems by herself’ and was ‘searching for help’. The deep sleep would just be ‘an expression of those feelings’.In this way, through dialogue, the author developed ideas in the narrative.

As the novel was almost entirely filled with short descriptive passages full of mystery paired with conversations between different people in different settings, the amount of eye-catching ‘events’ were minimal, compared with other novels, which may have a few hundred. The main character sitting inside a family restaurant until sunrise would not have been much fun for the reader to read about, so Takahashi is introduced by the author and Kaoru comes to ask Mari to interpret Chinese. Moving the setting from a random restaurant to ‘Alphaville’ was important, as Mari was able to meet Kaoru and two cleaners who worked there. They will later provide the chance for Mari to think deeply about Eri. This event is also an excuse to get Mari outside and generate the foundations for the plot. Meeting with the injured Chinese girl must have been a different experience for Mari.

Mari helps Kaoru because she guesses that Kaoru is not a bad person. Kaoru payed for Mari’s bill, but doesn’t begin to explain the situation clearly until they arrive at ‘Alphaville’. It is the first time that Mari had been to such a place. She attempted to communicate with the injured girl. She learned that the man who injured her also stole everything that she had. The injury is not such a big deal, with the blood mostly from the nose. Kaoru noticed that the guy didn’t know what he was doing and had only thrown a lot of ‘wild punches’ which dented the wall in a few places. The injured girl phones some person related to a Chinese gang and a man driving a Honda sports bike arrives. Kaoru made a deal with the man, who drops seven of the thousand-yen bills to his feet. Every movement that the man performs is unnaturally slow. Eventually he left with the girl on his bike. Kaoru later gives the same person three photos of the face of the man who went crazy in the hotel.

One small idea here is to do with violence. Nothing concrete is stated in the rest of the book, but thought and attention is given to the issue of Japanese people and violence. Murakami mentions violence in many of his other novels; each time in a different way. Obviously readers will dislike this crazy software-company man, but this man is ordinary and doesn’t feel that he has done anything wrong. ‘It is what he had to do’ the character thinks to himself.

Haruki Murakami’s book forces the audience to read until the end using two events that are eventually unresolved. One is the Chinese gang going after the man who injured the Chinese girl in ‘Alphaville’ and the other is Eri’s mysterious sleep.The descriptions of the city, the interior of rooms and even the music that flows within those areas are very directly stated. The text is kept simple in the translation of the Japanese. The text includes many references to darkness but the book itself is not dark. The main focus is on ‘After’ Dark, which is at the conclusion of the novel.The last two chapters are fully descriptive and brought the novel to an end. First describing the city from mid-air and then in the succeeding chapter, a sweeping view of a ‘quiet suburban residential neighbourhood’ in whichMari and Eri sleep in. Human beings are compared with scavenger crows. A news helicopter is described as a ‘nervous insect’.

Most of the book was filled with dialogue and conversations. No parts of the dialogue are excluded from the text. The conversations were exchanged in the various nightlife settings and engaged the reader. Dialogue passages begin with an overall description of the setting and include a sentence of description with every pause available. ‘Eyes that could be looking at an overgrown bush in the corner of a garden’ was rather distinct. In the translation of the Japanese, ‘em’, ‘ya’, ‘gimme’, and ‘whaddya’ are used to retain the different ways of speaking in Japanese. Use of words found in casual English conversation also helped create the feeling of naturally flowing ‘real’ sounding dialogue.

This novel was written in 2004 by Murakami after many of his more famous works. He writes mainly on the youth that he has lost in a simple and direct style. He achieved fame among the younger generation of Japan and also abroad. Most of the characters in After Dark were students and young people. In the future, we will all become 19 year olds and pursue our own dreams. I learnt that the unbelievable coincidences that occur one after the other may truly occur in our lives as well. Events in real life happen just like in the novel. Sometimes, for example, a group may kidnap a publishing company manager. That manager would feel as though the events that are happening are not real. It would feel like a television episode, a movie or a novel, which are all fiction. This novel is clearly fiction but does not prove too many times the fact that it is. The one positive thing that occurs due to the events of the novel is that Mari and Takahashi become friends after meeting several times in different places throughout the night.Meeting and knowing more people is always positive.

Many of the thick older books and short story collections of Murakami have always focussed mainly on entertaining the reader with interesting and other-worldly plots and characters. Maintaining reader’s interest has never been difficult for Murakami. Readers who like his style would become fans and buy most of his books, thereby ensuring his popularity. After Dark stands out from the numerous pieces of fiction as it is short enough to read several times. It reveals a deeper meaning and connection between the many events each time the book is read. The words used in the novel are also bearers of meaning. I strongly recommend others to read it at least twice and also not to read Murakami’s other books with After Dark. The special qualities of After Dark would be masked!

Noah Nishihara Homegroup T09