What happens After Dark?

Children of the night; dark alleyways. Lives small and limited, but simultaneously interconnected and expansive. Coincidence, destiny, chance encounters, randomness.A series of unrelated concepts & events unfolding through the course of one night. Spare, precise prose. Japanese minimalism, white walls, brushed sand, polished river pebbles.

But perhaps, most of all, a haze. That slightly nauseating dizziness, a sense walking through clouds, where images don't seem quite solid, when moving figures seem lose shape as they pass through air thicker than mercury, where the boundaries that define images begin to blur, when nothing seems real anymore. The intoxication brought on by insomnia, by fatigue, by watching the change from dark to light as a new day breaks.

All of these permeate After Dark, Haruki Murakami's latest novella. And it is a novella of several firsts. For starters, it is a short work by most standards, but doubly so for one by Murakami, whose novels tend to be long and complex narratives that allow the reader the luxury of many, many pages of the sparse prose so characteristic of his writing. Another departure for Murakami is the time span of the story, starting just before midnight and ending soon after dawn breaks the next morning. The one thing that Murakami retains is his the simplicity and honesty of his characters; their utterly ordinary lives, which are at the same time unique & quixotic.

If that seems oxymoronic, it is, because in true Murakami style, while initially each character appears, at least on the surface, to be totally unexceptional, it is when you get under their skin that their unique circumstances paint them in a more unique light. It's almost like you're walking down the street and ignore the ordinary masses all around you, but suddenly have one deconstructed in front of you to reveal the complexity within.

And then, there is the emergence of Murakami the voyeur, the film-maker. His prose veers eerily close to the tightness of a crafted script, minutely filling out the mise-en-scene; the music in the background, the colour of her jumper, the half eaten sandwich on a plate. There are directions for the cameraman, of when to pan out and take in the room, of when to focus in on the twitch of her lips as she sleeps.

What is the story? To be honest, it doesn't matter. The specifics of the events that take place during the night are irrelevant to the overall writing. There is meaning and symbolism in everything, but at the end, do the events of the night make a difference?

Ask someone who spends the entire night awake, only to see the morning wipe away all the fantasies that the darkness allows.