'Round Midnight

After Dark - Haruki Murakami

Nothing good happens after midnight, as momma used to say.

But novelists will persist in setting their stories during the witching hour. The opening scene of this novel is set in a Denny’s, maybe the one in Ikebukuro that my wife and I took my father-in-law to in 1992 when he looked like if he ate any more rice he would pop.

Anyway, in this short novel, after midnight in Denny’s sits college sophomore Mari Asai who can’t handle being at home because the family is having a problem related to her older sister Eri. Like parents in the hikikomori situation, the parents do nothing beyond hope their daughter’s strange disorder is just a spell that will go away on its own.

To the nourishing strains of Percy Faith, Mari is approached in the restaurant by Tetsuya Takahashi, who met Mari when her older sister dragged her in to fill out a double-date. Only nineteen years old, unused to be being out at such a time, Mari is wary and unforthcoming. Takahashi is also a college student, but with the usual open vistas of time that a Japanese college student has, he plays trombone all night in the college jazz band club.

It comes out in conversation that Mari can speak Chinese fluently because she went to an experimental school. After Takahashi leaves, Kaoru, the manager of a love hotel, comes to find her and ask a favor. A client has beaten up a Chinese sex worker and disappeared. The sex worker speaks no Japanese, so Kaoru, not wanting to call the cops who would only complicate the situation, needs to talk to the woman to find out how best to proceed. Mari agrees to interpret.

Thus begins a series of chance events and random confusions that thicken the darkness of the human heart and the darkness of the world. A person can examine the darkness of their own heart and still vow to act fairly, respect people, and be brave and persistent about dispelling their own darkness. But contact with the darkness of the world - the outcomes of acting out of fear, lust, and greed -  is dangerous, leaving bitter memories in Kaoru, disfiguring marks (an employee of the love hotel) or causing the end of a promising life.

This is the first Murakami I’ve ever read – I’m not good about reading living writers. Murakami has an eye like a drone outfitted with a camera, flitting over scenes and people to describe and set an eerie mood. He mentions background music a lot, letting the mood he wants to set to be partially expressed by familiar and not so familiar tunes. His themes allude to past Japanese literature: post-war Japanese society as drab prison of unending work (The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe) and the coming together of sleep, memory, voyeurism, and mortality (The House of Sleeping Beauties by Yasunari Kawabata).

Murakami’s interest is in the individual, often young, as they struggle to find out who they are and connect with other people who are also dealing with money-mad work-ridden society. Putting the needs of the group or employer before the needs of the one or friends or family leaves individuals on their own when they struggle with problems caused by sacrificing health and well-being to work or the mindless darkness of their heart. The darkness keeps people perpetually selfish in a tedious grind of gimme gimme gimme and self-absorbed in an adolescent way.