Haruki Murakami is one of Japan's finest authors, and for my money, one of the best writers wielding a pen these days. His works, global in voice but with a uniquely Japanese perspective, are filled with layers that disappear into subterranean mists. Murakami's work is that of a modern man's probing of where Japan today fits into its bloody, mythology-filled history. Underneath everyday doings like feeding your cat and playing a jazz record lie the potential for strange abysses indeed. Murakami's work isn't science fiction, precisely, but it carries a healthy element of the outer limits coloring the edge of everything.
Murakami's most recent American-published work, now out in paperback, is the short novel After Dark, which steps back from the longer epic approach of his other books like the magnificent The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka At The Shore.
After Dark is a series of vignettes set over one long Tokyo night for 19-year-old Mari, a student who can't sleep and is passing time at a coffee shop. She meets a goofily endearing young musician, a burly "love motel" manager, a battered prostitute and more as she passes a most strange, sleepless night. Meanwhile, Mari's gorgeous estranged sister Eri is in a strange coma-like state, her fate somehow connected to Mari's wanderings.
Murakami casts a beguiling rhythm of endless nights, evenings not spent getting loaded and throwing up in an alley somewhere, but rather, a more lonely, mysterious darkness – the people who sit in coffee shops alone at 2 a.m. reading a book, the guy shuffling home from work just as dawn is rising. After Dark is populated with the characters of the sleeping world: "Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night," one character notes sagely. The enigmatic After Dark is almost more of a tone poem than a fully fleshed-out novel, a kind of throat-clearing between bigger tales. Set in "real time" – each chapter ticks by with a clock telling us the hour of the evening – it has a brisk feeling.
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