“Takahashi is unable to tell for sure which side–which world–contains his center of gravity.” (222)
Just re-read Haruki Murakami’s small novel, After Dark. I am convinced all over again that it is a masterpiece, a genuine pearl of a tale of what happens to us “after dark.” In the late hours between midnight and dawn, those people awake at different times experience the variety of instabilities we are all prey to throughout our lives. ”Around us, cause and effect join hands, and synthesis and division maintain their equilibrium. Everything, finally, unfolded in a place resembling a deep, inaccessible fissure. Such places open secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light. None of our principles have any effect there. No one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out.” A paragraph later the narrative asks “But is this actually true?” (215)
I said “the narrative” because Murakami tries to destabilize the narrator of the telling in various ways by having the point of view consciously become at times a camera, like a security camera in the corner of a fast food place or a quick check store. There is a small ensemble of characters, some of whom interact, but there is no central figure. Maybe. And the one or two who might be central find themselves, in the middle of a cell phone chat, asking themselves “I am me and not me.” (220)
The people in the story ask all big questions about meaning, or most of them, memory, reincarnation, life after death, how to heal from shock and violence, running to escape and always being followed by consequences. In all ways this world is very similar to the spare, empty world of Beckett, for instance. And yet all is calm and tranquil it seems. There is a lightness to it all that seems hard to believe. In the midst of all of this anxiety, where is the angst? Why aren’t these people more upset with their upsetting lives? They all just keep going, the clock counts off the moments of the real time through this night, everything burns as brightly and consistently as enflamed neon does in glass tubes.
It would be as if Beckett’s vision and world has become translated into Hanging Out and Not Caring if Godot Comes of Not and meanwhile would you like another beer or coffee”? Engame is now the video screen, Happy Days loses the ironic, sarcastic edge and has become, for these young grown-ups, Pretty Happy Days with all the usual complaints. Life is weird, sure, and give me a call after you pick up the milk. Instead of existential turbulence we have the delicate play of unstable point of view, a light drifting around of observation and search for meaning that seems to absorb the darkness and even the violence and open the story to promise.
Eri and Mari Asai are two sisters at the center of the story. They were caught once in childhood on an elevator during an earthquake. They hugged each other then and were strong together in the darkness. But after that they lost close contact with each other. Since then they have felt far apart. Nothing seems able to change that. But Mari curls up next to her sleeping sister sleep until dawn, and the story ends with a slight affirmation, a tiny opening of consciousness that does promise that “There will be time until the next darkness arrives.”
And in the background all the while we hear a terrific playlist of superb music of every variety.
