3:AM Magazine

Haruki Murakami, After Dark, Harvill Secker, 2007

Those expecting detached-shadows, free-running unicorns, doors at the bottom of wells, or talking cats might be surprised to find the most recurring presence in Haruki Murakami’s latest novel is the trombone of the little known jazz player Curtis Fuller. The title itself - After Dark - seems not only to take its inspiration from the novel’s night-time setting, but also from the first track of Fuller’s most well known album Blues-ette, the song ‘Five Spot After Dark’. Indeed, the young man who befriends the younger of the two sisters who are the novel’s focus is himself a budding solo-trombonist. It is only pages into the novel before Takahashi is explaining to Mari how upon hearing ‘Five Spot After Dark’ he ‘felt the scales fall from [his] eyes.’

It’s no secret that Murakami is a man who enjoys his jazz. It’s well known that before his literary career reached the dizzying heights it circles at today he and his wife ran a jazz bar in his native Japan. Those familiar with his work will too have noticed the numerous musical references; the title of his breakthrough novel Norwegian Wood was taken from a Beatles song. He’s obviously not averse to citing musicians and their music as though he were writing the liner notes for their albums.

Perhaps it’s the relative brevity of this latest work, in comparison to the tomes of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, but the influence of music is that much more prevalent in After Dark. The use of background music in novels can be utilised to great effect: all music is associative and an author who can place a musical score alongside a scene has at his disposal a useful tool. However, a problem arises where a reader is not familiar with a particular reference. It becomes a dead-link, an unnecessary detail of scene and at worst an alienating aspect, a reader might feel they are missing something and wonder what effect the reference is intended to have. With numerous references to jazz pieces (Duke Ellington, Curtis Fuller, Percy Faith and his Orchestra), a genre reliant upon an acquired taste, Murakami does run the risk of mis-intertextualising. Of course, it is his use of intertextualisation that in the first instance made Murakami his name, and as many astute and inquisitive readers undoubtedly do, it is just as easy to go away and listen to such music, returning to the novel with an increased appreciation of its nuances.

By no means is After Dark an overly jazz-referenced nightmare, far from it. As would be expected it is more a dream-like meander in the early hours of the morning through the darker areas of Japan and the darker realms of the unconscious, sleeping state. Murakami’s prose is, as always, refreshingly light, allowing the reader to float through the narrative with ease. The story centres upon two sisters: the older, assured (yet apparently still troubled) beauty Ari and the bookish, awkward and shyer Mari. Unable to sleep, we find Mari reading an unnamed but very large book in a Denny’s (the west remains a great influence in Murakami’s Japan) whilst it is slowly revealed that her sister has no such insomnia, just the opposite: she has gone ‘to sleep for a while’. Her sister announced she ‘was going to go to sleep for while’ two months ago and hasn’t woken up since. She’s not in a coma, and there is apparently nothing medically wrong with her, she’s just decided to take an extended nap. Need you be reminded: this is Murakami.

In Denny’s, the Curtis Fuller inspired Takahashi bumps his way into Mari’s night on his way to his own all-night, Kerouac-style jam session with his band. After some nervous small-talk, Takahashi finds that Mari is familiar with Fuller’s ‘Five Spot After Dark’ and as anyone knows, when a girl gets a guy’s obscure reference, he ain’t giving her up too quick. When Takahashi has to leave to blow bee-bop-bop-bop on his brass in a cold, back street warehouse, he manages to bring Mari back to him through Kaoru, an ex-female-wrestler who manages a ‘love hotel’ (read brothel-cum-dodgy-hotel-for-inconspicuous-couples) called ‘Alphaville’. Need you be reminded: this is Murakami. ‘Alphaville’ is also a film by the French New-wave master Jean-Luc Goddard about a futuristic Paris where emotion is flung fiercely out the window, along with love and irony, and sex is just sex. Intertexuality. Need you be reminded… And so on.

When an ‘Alphaville’ client beats up a young Chinese girl who doesn’t speak a word of Japanese, Kaoru needs a translator and Takahashi recommends Mari, the bookish girl he just met who he also discovered is fluent in Chinese. In such a way the plot allows Mari and Takahashi to develop their friendship, in turn affording Mari the opportunity to confide the reason for her insomnia: Ari.

Meanwhile… (Resorting to ‘meanwhile’ illustrates how, even in a shorter piece, Murakami’s ability to weave his narratives confounds a linear retelling. It is no surprise, having orchestrated such mind-boggling works as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Murakami is at the point of perfecting narrative shifts to such an end that After Dark, though structurally complicated, hardly jerks from beginning to end, even vicious mobile phone calls slip into the ether of his Japanese night.) the sleeping Ari is transported into the television. What is on the other side of this television I’ll leave to be discussed by the Finnegan’s Wake Reading Group when they finish their current assignment. It may or may not be the client who beat up the young girl in ‘Alphaville’, it might just be my mate Stu, he’s read a lot of Murakami, decide for yourself.

For this simultaneous narrative Murakami employs a filmic technique as his point of view. The reader is led to believe they are viewing Ari through the lens of a camera, a media that allows no direct contact with the scene, an entirely extra-diegetic viewpoint that holds the action at a distance. In these sections we are with Murakami as a ‘we’. We watch the static of the TV try to build a picture, we watch Ari trapped in an Auster-esque locked room, we watch, unable to intervene, as Ari attempts to wake up. The effect of this ‘we’, of this pure viewpoint, affirms the dream-like nature of Ari’s presence within the novel. Think of our own dreams, are we not viewers of them ourselves, viewing them from an abstract distance, unable to interact, yet at the same time part of the same dream? It is a clever technique that pays great dividends for Murakami and for the reader, though the more short-fused reader may long for the narrator’s interjection, finding themselves frustrated by the voyeuristic viewpoint.

Murakami is undoubtedly a born storyteller and After Dark is just another example of his wonderful imagination and ability. The themes central to Murakami’s work are all there: Loneliness, Isolation, Conscious versus Un/Sub-Conscious, and Japanese folklore, and they are wrapped up in his usual easy-going prose and westernised detail.

In his recent essay The Curtain, Milan Kundera recounts an anecdote about how he kept on and on at a friend to read Gombrowicz. The friend eventually did, but he read a novel that wasn’t as well received. The friend read the wrong book: he wasn’t impressed at all by Gombrowicz. Despairingly Kundera explained the mistake his friend had made but it was too late, the friend had taken Kundera’s recommendation but found it to be fruitless. There just isn’t time enough to read everything one wishes to read. Murakami is a brilliant writer, but After Dark is not his best work. It is a fine and appetising starter, composed of the perfect flavours to get you salivating for the main course: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Should you have never read Murakami and have little time, go straight for the main course. However, if you’ve already eaten dinner, you’ll know only too well that there is always room for more.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Glenn Fisher was born in Grimsby, in a county that no longer exists, in 1981. After working in local government since leaving college in 1997, he took very early retirement in 2004. He is 3:AM’s Film Editor and has just finished the Professional Writing degree course at the Grimsby Institute.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, June 20th, 2007.