After dark, very late at night ‘yin’ goes to sleep and ’yang’ wakes up (yin-yang: half white, half black Chinese symbol. Conceptually it means, inter alia, showing balance in the world). The story takes place between reality and dream. A perfect time to go out for those who hide during a day and do not want to be recognized
: individualists who do not want to be disturbed, criminals who are looking for their victims to get something by force, prostitutes who are waiting for their clients and would prefer to remain anonymous. The night can cover all these: noise of the daylight and imperfections of reality. When it is dark the world seems to be blurred, conspicuous and dangerous-opposite to the daylight.
The power of extreme contradictions seems to be exposed in the book very clearly. There is night, in contrast to a day and night is a chaos, dawn –a return to productivity, good characters against the bad ones, women( weak and single victims) vs men (strong and bold leaders; often there is a collective team behind him; like gang) and most of all the main characters are extreme as well: Mari and her sister Eri.
The former one is an average-looking girl, prospective student, ambitious and very intelligent young person who does not need attention to be confident. All she needs is not to be disturbed to read. She is happy to live in the shadow of her ‘sparkling’ and attention-seeking sister. Plunged in her own individual world created a kind of antisocial barrier for others to get in, and she chooses whom she decides to open the door to it.
Her sister, in turn, is a real beauty, a totally different person than Eri. She is a model posing for the magazines, sometimes a hostess in the shows on TV, loves being in the centre of attention. Never was interested in books but could easily tell the difference between Gucci and Versace. Fashion world fascinated her and she was a part of it. Eri and Mari are just the opposites, and even though they live under the same roof they live in totally different worlds.
As far as the relationship between the siblings is concerned they know little about themselves and thus are indifferent toward each other. Not that they get on well but they do not argue, do not have sisters’ fights etc, never stand on each other’s way. As long as they are both safe and sound they do not interfere in each other’s lives. However, the situation changes if some problems come up…Then, Eri cannot sleep a wink and decides to wander off at night, read a book in Danny’s restaurant and kill the time. She cannot get back home to see her sister sleeping deeply in oblivion for no obvious reason. Then, slowly Mari reveals her concern about her sister. They are like twinned homeostasis -Mari is awake because Eri is asleep.
In the heart of darkness she is not left on her own. Still, there are a few of lost souls who are awake as well. Takahashi-a young jazz man, Kaoru-a manager of the love hotel, Chinese illegal prostitute, or a businessman who used her.
But the night joins all the ‘invisible’ individualities together and exposes their characters. They seem to be in the spotlight now-whether they want it or not .Murakami concentrates mostly on the nooks and corners of people’s life after dark…
He is a perfectionist as far as the abstract and non- describable descriptions are concerned; for example the extract when Eri is waking up or falling asleep. The author smoothly deals with mental shifts, moves from psychic to metapsychic, from consciousness to subconsciousness. The genius of his art is that he manages to put into words the most elusive moments for he is an excellent observer on invisible things. Also, he displayed a confident ear for conversations. Murakami is a master at psychological insight, grasp of spirit and morality. He loves twisting and turning his plots and leaves many questions unanswered, similarly to the French director Jean-Luc Godard from whom he borrowed the name for the hotel in After Dark: Alphaville. (Godard titled his film Alphaville, in 1965)
Like in many novels Murakami does not forget to insert some omnipresent American symbols: Red Sox cap, coffee, drugs-as if he wanted to stress the fact that westernized intrusion to the pure Japanese island left it spoiled and dangerous; and that there is not such a place in the world that would not be touched by American’s tentacle; most of the countries are a hallucinated hodgepodge of America.
Using emphatically put narration (by using ‘we’) we feel closer to the main characters and we follow their adventures intensely. In fact, we epitomize ourselves with some characters at some points that makes the contact between us and the book more intimate and that is why we experience it so much. There is this constant feeling and the atmosphere of ‘After dark’ that somehow sounds so familiar to all of us….whatever it is that is Murakami’s secret magnetic power of drawing our attention. And it works- amazingly.
