After Dark

by Haruki Murakami, 2004, translated to English by Jay Rubin, 2007; published by Knopf. 191 pages.

1 September 2007

Interesting: This was a page-turner in which nothing seemed to happen.
The story is about a bookish girl named Mari who’s spending the night wandering around a seedy part of Tokyo. In the meantime, her sister, a teenage fashion model named Eri, is lying asleep in her room when something strange begins to happen. Her unplugged tv flickers on. A man with a mask (called The Man with No Face) watches her from the screen, and then she vanishes from the bed and appears to have been sucked into the television.
In the meantime, Mari gets called on to help a Chinese prostitute who’s been beaten by one of her customers. A photograph of the abuser is sent to the Chinese gangsters, who swear they’ll get their revenge.
To me, these are all cliché scenes from the sort of Japanese movies I love watching. Revenge, weird science fiction abductions, and especially the blurring of the border between reality and fantasy. So all through the novel I was eager for the moment when that big explosion or chase or revenge killing would happen.
And in the meantime, I was killing time with Mari, listening in on her conversations with the various people she met in the night, with Kaoru, the massive female wrestler; with Korogi, who’s running away from people who want to kill her; and especially with Takahashi, a messy-haired jazz musician who seems to be falling in love with Mari, but isn’t quite sure and can’t quite convince her to let down her guard.
It was only after the book was over, and I was puzzling over whether I’d missed something or not, that I began to wonder about that Man with No Face, about the way he never did anything but watch. I wondered if he wasn’t maybe supposed to represent God, or whatever mythical being we hope or fear might be there beyond death, beyond the other side of the screen.
What exactly happened to Eri when she was trapped inside that tv set? Although we never find out, it’s interesting that practically every character in the story has some recollection about being trapped in a small, enclosed space. Sometimes it’s in a dream, or it’s the way they felt during a difficult period of their life; in Mari’s case, it was a real-life experience of being trapped in an elevator.
With all its eeriness and simplicity, this story leaves a very clear image: life is just one room, and eventually we all have to leave the room. Whether there’s another room out past it, nobody can say. But the truth is, we’re all a little scared of that exit we have to make. If we want, we can make our time in the room quite miserable for everyone involved. Or, if we’re willing to share our fears, we might instead offer one another a little comfort.