BOOK REVIEW

Rating: 8/10

Haruki Murakami for me is a pretty complex writer. You can't put all his works in one box. On one hand you have the lyricism of “Norwegian Wood” and “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” and on the other the gritty, rough, and bizarre Trilogy of the Rat and “Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world”. “After Dark” falls somewhere in between these two poles. It is a short novel, only 200 or so pages, yet brave in its language, eccentric in dialogue, and plain absurdist in terms of plot.

We have the two sisters, Mari and Eri. Mari is spending her night out in a café, reading a big book. She encounters a boy named Takahashi, who plays the trombone in a band. Takahashi went to high school with Mari's sister and knows her slightly. They begin talking. Meanwhile, Eri has been asleep for two months, and when the clock blinks 0: 00, her plugged out TV flickers open, and she starts waking up -- only to find herself inside the TV.

The novel is probably Murakami's least hyped one, and has an aura of emptiness surrounding it. Murakami's alienations are embedded into the novel, even though not one of the characters put on his shoes. Which is odd, because that is the one thing which is so ubiquitous about his books. You find a character making spaghetti and listening to The Beach Boys whilst his copy of “The Magic Mountain” is sprawled open on the kitchen table, and you know it is Murakami himself.

It is often joked that you can describe Murakami's books in one sentence: cats, jazz, alienation, Beatles, something vanishing, weird phone calls, running, students, Tokyo at night, mysterious women, cooking.

But this isn't entirely true. Murakami's surrealism is comedy. In “After Dark”, Eri is perplexed when she finds herself in a world that resembles her room inside her 'TV'. We see her trying to push the doors and windows open. We see her touching everything, trying to understand the construction, the physics of her world; then going back to sleep. Nights are portrayed as full of longings, full of intrusions.

For me, the trilogy of the Rat is still Murakami at his best, but people interested to see that other sensuous, romanticist side of Murakami would do well to read this.