After Dark

After Dark by Haruki Murakami
I should have known, I suppose, the strangeness that is a Murakami novel. Questioning and prompting, After Dark invades our sense of normalcy and of the conscious and unconscious worlds in an odd and uncertain way.

The novel takes place over the course of a few hours in the dead of night, in Tokyo. We follow Mari as she wanders the streets, frequents diners and generally runs into various night characters. Her meetings, which take her to love hotels, make her witness to crimes and have her encounter old acquaintances, meander in and out of normalcy, painting a patched portrait of Tokyo night life. Spliced with Mari's encounters are narrative snippets relating to her sister, Eri, a mere figure - silent and unmoving - bound in a perpetual sleep.

After Dark is not a passive novel. By no means a light read, it denies you the luxury of an east narrative, demanding patience and thought. The novel begins to explore connections between siblings and human beings in a general sense, while touching on aspects of life, death and consciousness, all in a seemingly detached manner. A style unlike any other I have read, Murakami writes without weight, drifting in and out of subject matter, often dark material, without ever putting down roots. It is easy, then, to feel disconnected from the story, and rather uninterested in the characters themselves, as the lack of connectivity can feel cold. While questions arise from the pages about connectivity and existence, it is as though as an after thought, a mere vague wonder, which lacks any sense of urgency or importance. This is, however, a hallmark of Murakami's style in that he does not aid the reader or allow them easy access to his work. His stories, instead, require time, the slow reading of poetry where words are ingested and then digested. It is only through active reading that the deeper sensations of After Dark begin to show through.

Because of this, After Dark is often polarizing, sometimes hailed as a masterful display of genius writing, or else dismissed as a cold hard story about one bland character and her sleeping sister. For me, I fall somewhere in between. I can recognize the careful work that is After Dark, and yet despite knowing the assumed intentions, I could not grab hold of a strong enough -anything- to really connect with the novel. Such is the effect of Murakami, it seems. Brilliant perhaps, but therefore isolating.

Noruwei no Mori

Norwegian Wood is a story about love, sex, relationships, and the complexities which define and effect the interactions of the human species. A novel centered around loss and pain, Haruki Murakami paints a picture of late 1960's Tokyo fraught with confusion, emotion, and the breaking down of the human mind. Norwegian Wood is in many ways a beautiful tale of tragedy and confusion. The style and cadence of Murakami's writing, and specifically his dialogue hold a distinctive, snappy honesty rarely found. The chracters are flawed, real, and therefore that much easier for the reader to invest in as we follow them along these winding roads of instability and small victories. The bluntness with which chracters unfold topics and events of their lives is refreshing, though occasionally jarring.

Written originally in 1987, and dealing with the 60's there was a sense of era about the novel that really seemed to capture the spirit of the times - which though enjoyable for the atmosphere of it, occasionally left me feeling I was a bit young to fully appreciate all the underlying currents of the time period in which the novel was set. [myself having been born in 1988] Never-the-less the feel of the novel was an authentic and wonderfully mystical one, permiated by a love of music, free spirits and soft revolutions which coloured the novel and its tragedies with all the more clarity.

A complex novel which attempts to unravel the logistics of the soul, sanity and love and death, Murakami questions convention and loyalties as the main character, Toru Watanabe stumbles his way from adolescents into full-blown accountable adulthood.

Toru is a resolutely optomistic character that finds himself hopelessly in love with his deceased best friend's girlfriend Naoko. Despite her sweetness and beauty, Naoko remains emotionally unavailable as she constantly attempts to unravel the sickness within her own mind - a reoccuring theme that is never directly explained nor defined, as mental strangeness and 'brokeness' becomes a concept of relativity which continually infiltrates chracters and relationships as the story unfolds.

In stark contrast to the quaint Naoko is Midori - the spunky, outspoken, short-skirt wearing character from Watanabe's classes. Midori adds a sense of uncertainty, adventure and bluntness to Watanabe's life previously missing, and he and Midori become odd but close friends. As Watanabe manueveres his way through university, he continually finds himself re-evaluating and analyzing not only his relationships, but the way in which he interacts with those closest to him.

Because of this constant evaluation of relationships, the novel is completely interwoven with explicit interactions of sex and erotic encounters. Though this certainly adds merit to Watanabe's inner dilemas - namely, the fine lines between love, sex, romantic relationships and friendships - the explicit nature was certanly more than my person taste appreciated, and is something to keep in mind and be advised of for readers.

Despite these less than appealing scenes, the novel is a well written stylistic tale of the downfalls in human nature, and the inexplicable connections humans form with one another.