At least until the camera “moves in on” an unplugged TV set, which begins transmitting static-laced images of a “masked” figure: a man seated in chair, alone in a large, fluorescent-lit room. In the stillness of her bedroom, “we” will adopt “the vantage of a camera”, and this camera observes her and the room with a voyeur’s attentions. Eri is the “sleeping beauty” at the very center of After Dark and her unaccountable sleep, “is not normal”.

With its terrifying conclusion, “Sleep” now feels like a first foray into the broader districts that After Dark inhabits…Įri Asai has exactly the opposite condition from the narrator of “Sleep”: she never wakes. Hers is no mere case of insomnia, but something else, something inexplicable. She reads Anna Karenina compulsively and nibbles chocolate with the ecstatic pleasure she enjoyed before her marriage. She’s the wife of a boring dentist, the mother of their young son, and she finds her dull routines and stifling domestic life dramatically challenged by an unaccountable sleeplessness. In this vividly creepy tale (written in the first person singular typical of Murakami’s work) the narrator cannot sleep and has no desire to do so. Readers of Murakami’s 1993 collection of short stories, The Elephant Vanishes may recall the story, “Sleep”. We follow the same rules, so to speak, as orthodox time travelers.

But we are not physically present in the place, and we leave no traces. We, the reader, are kept at a distance, yet “we” the narrator are everywhere: “We look. With these and other abbreviations of the narrative form, Murakami seems to insist upon the reader’s remove from After Dark.

Place and scene are indicated with terse, script-like brevity: “We are inside a Denny’s”… and a few pages later, “The interior of the same Denny’s as before.” Several pages of dialogue pass with nothing more descriptive than the names of the characters followed by a colon and the words they speak. when the novel begins, until its close at 6:52 a.m. In fact, the time is so much the present that chapter breaks and page-headings inform us of its passage: from 11:56 p.m. The city is Tokyo, and the time is the present. “Through the eyes of a high-flying bird,” we, the readers, and “we” the first person plural narrator of Haruki Murakami’s new novel After Dark, swoop down upon a city at four minutes before midnight. After Dark by Haruki Murakami Knopf, 208 pp.

After the dark haruki murakami