After Dark

9/10

Published in 2004 by Haruki Murakami.

One of Murakami’s best, and entirely unlike most his oeuvre.

Spoilers.

I will maintain that Murakami isn’t one of my absolute tippy-top favorite authors—those halls are crowded by Pratchett, Dumas, Dick, Le Guin, Asimov, Foo, & friends—but he is remarkably consistent. I started Ann Patchett’s Run and it’s extremely boring. I sort of expected that, having only read Bel Canto after Commonwealth, which was OK, but I did not expect Run to be so bland so far. I’ve not picked it up in a few days to polish it off and feel no particular motivation to do so. I’ve never felt that with a Murakami, though I would hesitate to call any of his works a 10/10 (even 1Q84 or others or this one), I would hesitate to call any of them bad either—mediocre at worst. As such, I’ve been moving through his catalogue slowly; the only novel I haven’t read (a position I will soon rectify) is Sputnik Sweetheart; but I’ve only read one short story collection, After the Quake, which was good; and only one essay/nonfiction work: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running—which was also good. That is a lot of Murakami over a relatively short amount of time, and certainly more than enough to get used to his formula.

I said that the works which belie that formula are his best, and After Dark stands as the paragon of such a sentiment. I really like After Dark—it easily brushes up against 1Q84 and Colourless as his best work. After Dark paints one night in a big city (which I’m treating as Tokyo) and paints intriguing vignettes loosely strung together. These stories are tighter than After the Quake, but still aren’t extremely cohesive. Magical realism is set aside, for the most part, and the story instead is remarkably grounded—a story that could reasonably have been inspired by interspersed memories of moments in an unforgiving city. It is hard to pinpoint what exactly is most enticing about the work, and that may be due to my context as a reader—reading this after his other works feels like a break from the norm—but I will also affirm that this is a wonderful book in its own right, sans any context.

The feelings the book paints are exquisite, and well capture loneliness and wistfulness and change and so many other things. A distinct feeling from the book is walking in an empty garden-park at an orange dawn, feeling cool bracing wind and quiet chirps of birds and distant snores of highways. It is majestically melancholy, sweeping with a bittersweet picture of a single night, forcing a recognition and realization of the pedestrian nature of strange things, at scale.

I desperately want a Folio edition.