Steve Reads

If you’ve read Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, you know you’re in the presence of a genius who just needs to get himself under control sometimes. He can juggle a million interesting objects at once — hammers, torches, scarves, chainsaws, other jugglers — but sometimes he just gets bored, and while the audience is staring up, jaws agape, he lets all those colorful objects drop and walks off to have a sandwich. That’s Wind-Up Bird in a nutshell. Yet I still think most people would really enjoy it, despite its suffering from attention deficit disorder.

After Dark isn’t like that, in no small part because it spans a single night; I like to think of this as a Murakami setting for himself what the economists call a precommitment strategy: he knows that he can run off the rails if he’s not careful, so he sets up a story to keep himself in check.

And what a fun story it is. We meet a charming musician named Takahashi as he ambles into a Denny’s, late one night, and intrudes on a quiet, studious girl named Mari Asai who’s poring over her books. As it turns out, Takahashi knows Mari’s sister Eri, who is at least some kind of astonishing looker and probably something more like a model. She’s the kind of girl whom Takahashi would go out of his way to talk to, if she would only give him the time of day. When Mari veers into his orbit, and Takahashi realizes who she is, he has no choice but to ask about her gorgeous sister.

What we, the readers, know about Eri is that she is asleep in the alternate chapters. We jump back and forth between the Takahashi-and-Mari thread and the camera-focused-on-a-sleeping-Eri thread. And I say “camera” literally: we’re watching her through a television, the camera end of which is inside Eri’s bedroom. Only, not really her bedroom; more like Eri on a bed in an otherwise empty room. Is it a jail cell? What is this strange room with the camera?

While she sleeps, craziness ensues in Mari’s world. Takahashi spends long enough with Mari to know a) that she speaks Chinese, and b) that she’ll be studying in that Denny’s all night. He steps out to practice with his band, and while he’s out he runs into a friend of his who runs a pay-by-the-hour hotel frequented by prostitutes and their johns — a “love hotel,” as they call it. Turns out there’s — surprise surprise — a Chinese prostitute in there, badly beaten and scared, and no one knows how to talk to her. Takahashi knows just the translator. He sends the hotel’s manager into Denny’s to pick up Mari, who gladly comes along to help. She was bored in the diner anyway.

In one world we have the beautiful sister, asleep in a strange room. In the other we have the bookish sister translating for a bruised prostitute. The story has one toe in a beautiful world, one toe in the filth. At times those worlds collide, or at least pass each other on the street with a curt nod. Laying on the seam between the two worlds is a cell phone that literally passes messages between them; it’s a very clever trick that can only make the reader smile. (This reader, anyway.)

At just over 200 fairly-large-print pages, with rapid-fire dialogue between charming or menacing characters, you’ll finish After Dark within a couple hours. Murakami sometimes writes candy, but it’s intensely nourishing candy. (In this I liken it to early Beatles albums.) It may be tempting to avoid Murakami, but it’s even more tempting to read him.