A Review: After Dark
Title of Work: After Dark
Author: Haruki Murakami
Format:
Published: 2004
Started:
Finished: 2023-01-20\
Posted: Goodreads
Rating: 2/5
It is night. In the neighborhood, all is quiet above the faint and ever present background noise of the city. A black cat saunters past in the alley below and pauses, one paw raised as if momentarily frozen, and looks upward in your direction. As you move through the open window on the second floor the cat is suddenly reanimated and continues on in the same direction, this time with more vigor. Inside now, your eyes adjust to the warm darkness of the indoors. You notice the small trophy shelf on the opposite wall first. Dusty prizes sit atop the shelf and medals hanging from ribbons of every color fill the hooks below. The door is closed. To the right, there is a small desk supporting a translucent blue iMac G3. Two piles of textbooks and loose papers take up opposite ends. There is a muffled stirring and your attention turns now to the bed against the wall opposite the desk. Long, black hair protrudes from a jumble of blankets and pillows. The linen mass shifts as you watch and you wonder if you shouldn’t be here, watching this unknown slumberer. At the sound of a feminine yawn you realize this is the bedroom of a teenage girl. Her stirring continues and as the edge of the blanket begins to come down your physical self suddenly dissolves. You are now pure Point of View (POV), an invisible film camera capturing this scene. It is night. The girl sits up slowly and stretches. She rubs her tired eyes and scans the room slowly, perhaps searching for some perceived presence. She stops on your vantage point, where you watch the scene as pure POV. For a moment you wonder if she can see you but you soon remember that you are pure POV, invisible and unseen, a silent observer. It is night. The girl’s gaze falls and she begins to lay backward, back toward the pillow, back toward sleep. Time seems to slow down as her head descends and from your POV as the camera you follow downward and closer as if on a dolly angled from the top corner of the room directly down toward where the girl’s head rested on the pillow moments ago. Suddenly your POV changes and you are inside a 2nd place soccer trophy on the shelf, peering out from the two handled cup painted a dull silver. Scene change. You’re in a Denny’s at 2am. It is night.
Okay, okay I’ll spare you the rest. I’m exaggerating a bit to make a point here but Murakami wrote this with large sections that read almost like a stage or screen play. Lighting queues, camera angles, camera movement, very direct scene descriptions. The cast’s internal thoughts and feelings read like character directions from a script, meant to be internalized by the actor such that they are embodied in the performance rather than read aloud in monotone.
There is some deliberate symbolism, some social commentary, a bit of a weird foreboding mood (not a bad thing!), and a subdued sense of magical realism that seems characteristic of Murakami’s works. Unfortunately, this all came across as very stilted and mechanical to me and I had a hard time feeling the story or really getting invested in it. The characters came across flat and I didn’t really care about their respective plot contributions. I think the stage play-esque style combined with what I felt to be a subpar audiobook narrator really left me disappointed in this one. To me, the obvious factor that takes a script or a screen/stage play from directions on paper to a spectacle worth watching (or listening) and enjoying is the performance and humanity of the actors.
Janet Song read this one and I don’t know if they told her to withhold emotion and situational expression for some creative reason here but it really did not work for me. I have to assume most would agree but the narrator makes or breaks an audio experience. An excellent narrator can bring energy and depth of character to the story; they control the pacing and heavily influence the tone. In this case I have to say the narrator lessened my enjoyment of the work. I assume that I’m missing the point here and it’s some artistic choice that is just lost on me but so be it. She reads like a robot. Next time I think I’ll save her the trouble and just have Siri dictate.
By the way, I LOVED The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and will continue to read more Murakami but this time, After Dark was a miss.