After Dark
by Haruki Murakami
Knopf

Each of Haruki Murakami's novels can be placed along a spectrum between unbridled flights of fantasy (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) and more traditional stories like South of the Border, West of the Sun which, while still dreamlike, hew more closely to reality. His last novel, Kafka on the Shore, published in English in 2005, treated readers to ghostly apparitions, cameo appearances by Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker and a mysterious stone with the power to open another dimension if rotated just so. After Dark is more restrained — narrower in scope, as well as much shorter — but no less haunting.

A solitary young woman reads and nurses a cup of coffee at an all-night diner. Meanwhile, back home, her sister lies sleeping in bed, the TV at her feet sputtering with static. A salaryman works in a deserted office. An aspiring musician kills time in the hours before rehearsal. At first glance, it seems a night like any other (and perhaps this is indeed the case), but, this being Murakami, there is also much more here than meets the eye.

In the past, Murakami has written exclusively in the first person singular, inviting readers into the subjective experience of his narrators to build empathy and allow us to relate even in the most fantastic of scenarios (stepping from an elevator into a formless void, watching Colonel Sanders mutilate kittens). In After Dark, he uses the plural to achieve the opposite effect. "Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair," he writes at one point. Later, the disembodied collective of which we are a part zooms in on the sleeping woman: "We allow ourselves to become a single point of view, and we observe her for a time."

The technique suggests that we could just as easily have alit on any other figure in the Tokyo night, and that, on closer inspection, we might have found them to be just as enigmatic as the denizens of After Dark: Eri, a young fashion model unable or unwilling to awaken for weeks on end; her semi-estranged sister Mari, whose resulting insomnia sends her roaming until dawn from cafe to bar to "love hotel"; Takahashi, propelled by a moral crisis to abandon music to study the law, who remains consumed with both women following a single day spent together years earlier; Shirakawa, the generic office worker who savagely beats a prostitute without batting an eye and dumps her blood-stained clothes on the way home to his family.

The potential for human connection hovers over every scene, as each of these fundamentally isolated individuals and the others whose paths they cross either strive to make contact or shrink from it. Meanwhile, "we" remain detached, always at least somewhat in the dark. As we swoop from one scene to the next, settling on each of the book's characters in turn, we are offered inferences drawn from their gestures or expressions, and guesses as to what they might be thinking or why they might be acting as they are, but never with much certainty.

This indetermination doesn't equal vagueness. Murakami's writing, translated by the dependable Jay Rubin, is as precise and detailed as ever. Characters are clearly drawn, and Tokyo's nocturnal cityscape comes alive through extended organic metaphors. Still, it would be hard to talk about the book's events in terms of a "plot." Early in the book, "we" realize that "Something is about to happen ... Something of great significance." By morning, something has indeed changed in each of these lives, but it would be hard to say exactly what, or to know what daylight will bring.

Beginning with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, first published in 1992, and more intently since 1995's twin tragedies — the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway and the Kobe earthquake — Murakami has explored the dissonance in contemporary Japanese culture: the historical guilt buried beneath the passion for modernism, the human frailty subsumed beneath prideful conformity, the urge to treat victimhood as a crime, the emptiness hidden at the heart of Japan's postwar miracle. One could also interpret After Dark along these lines. As much as the four main characters have been drawn together by their various personal and metaphysical links, they can also be seen as four distinct types of contemporary Japanese, each with its distinctive existential malady. In this light, the book's fragilely optimistic ending offers a tantalizing clue that begs for interpretation.

Much could also be made of the television that literally draws the viewer into itself, or the cell phone in the corner store freezer issuing anonymous death threats to anyone who answers it. Then again, it could as easily be read simply as the dreams of a single night. Trying to nail down a Murakami novel to a single, specific meaning is a fool's errand. In an online interview following the release of his last novel, Kafka on the Shore, which had drawn some 8,000 questions from readers, he explained:

Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It's hard to explain, but that's the kind of novel I set out to write.

Thanks for checking in, Harry. But of course, Murakami has never been a conventional storyteller — compared to Richard Ford or Jane Austen, he is scarcely the same literary species. A closer analogy would be to music that is felt and understood without ever coalescing into a literal, verbal explanation. In fact, it is through music that Murakami, then the 29-year-old owner of a jazz bar, first came to writing, as he explained in a recent essay in The New York Times Book Review:

I had practiced the piano as a kid, and I could read enough music to pick out a simple melody, but I didn't have the kind of technique it takes to become a professional musician. Inside my head, though, I did often feel as though something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started. ... Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music.

In this sense, After Dark is more to be enjoyed than fully understood. Don't break your back trying to trace the melody from beginning to end, or to decipher the harmonics of each chord progression. Just pour a few fingers of scotch, put on some Thelonious Monk and let it take you deep into the night.

— J. Daniel Janzen (dan at clownyard dot com)