The world always looks different after dark. Even in a busy, perpetually lit city like Tokyo, things start to feel hidden and shadowy, and it becomes easier to believe in strange, surreal, or even nightmarish possibilities in places that would look entirely normal in broad daylight.

I’ve only read a few Murakami books, but even from that small sample it’s clear that he has a fascination for the odd, the unexplained, the unresolved. So the setting of After Dark—a single Tokyo night in which strange things happen—is perfect for him.

The book opens with a young student called Mari sitting in an all-night Denny’s diner, and it’s Mari’s actions through this night that form most of what could loosely be called a plot. Equally important to the story, however, is her sister Eri, who doesn’t speak a word or do anything because she is asleep the whole time.

Eri is important to the plot and meaning of After Dark in a couple of ways. Whereas Mari’s narrative is for the most part realistic and believable, Eri’s incorporates strong elements of magical realism and the supernatural. It turns out she has been sleeping not for hours but weeks, and one of the reasons Mari is sitting in an all-night diner is to escape from the worries and strangeness of a home in which her sister simply doesn’t wake up.

On this particular night, Eri’s TV crackles to life as she sleeps, and she is watched by a sinister figure on the other side of the screen. Since we as readers are also watching her sleep, it begs the question of whether we are the sinister observer in this scenario. It gets worse when Eri is sucked into the TV and finds herself trapped on the other side, seeing her bedroom but unable to access it.

Although the meaning of this disturbing scene is intentionally obscure, I think perhaps it helps to view it in light of a scene from Mari’s narrative in which she is called to a nearby love hotel to help a Chinese sex worker who has been beaten up by a client. In this case, the male violence is overt and physical, perpetrated by an apparently normal, inoffensive-seeming office worker who fills out spreadsheets while listening to classical music.

Perhaps the scene with Eri is a commentary on how a male-dominated society views beautiful young women, trapping them in a different kind of violence of voyeurism. Eri’s beauty is frequently mentioned, so perhaps this is a modification of the “Sleeping Beauty” myth. In modern Japan, there’s no handsome prince passing by to wake her up—only a television to swallow her up and trap her even further.

Eri’s story is also important in understanding why her sister Mari is so isolated and resistant to other characters’ attempts to befriend her. She has been defined by her sister’s beauty just as much as Eri herself. When a young musician approaches Mari in the diner, he can’t even remember her name—he just knows her as Eri’s sister and keeps talking about how beautiful Eri is. He does seem genuinely to want to connect with Mari, but she pushes him away because she thinks he’s only interested in her beautiful sister who has always overshadowed her.

There’s a powerful sense of alienation pervading After Dark. Murakami creates a world of empty, transactional spaces: an American chain restaurant, a love hotel where men pay for sex with vulnerable immigrant women, the sterile office where the man who’s just inflicted violence on the Chinese sex worker goes about his inoffensive work life. The main characters try to fight against it, but with limited success. Eri and Mari are trapped in different ways, and so is Takahashi, the musician who is rehearsing by night but studies law by day.

I think this is connected with the story Takahashi tells Mari of three brothers who wash up on a Hawaiian island and are told by a god that they can push a boulder up a hill, and where they finish is where they will live:

“The higher you go, the more of the world you will be able to see from your home. It’s entirely up to you how far you want to push your boulder.”

I see it as a story about settling for a comfortable life vs. striving for more. It’s easiest to settle close to the shore, where you can’t see much of the world but you have what you need to eat and live. To be the third brother, pushing a boulder higher and higher, into less hospitable terrain, is a hard path to follow. The characters in After Dark seem to be pushing their own boulders with varying degrees of success, trying to escape from conformity and to achieve a wider view of the world but finding it very arduous.

The voice that Murakami uses in After Dark is very interesting. Mostly it’s quite simple and restrained, in contrast to the somewhat fantastical events and deeper themes of the novel. But sometimes he also pulls back to take a much broader, cinematic view in which nocturnal Tokyo is a character with a life of its own. For example, here’s the opening of the book:

Eyes mark the shape of the city. Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature—or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm.

Murakami returns to this “we” voice regularly throughout the book, usually during scene transitions. It’s reminiscent of the directions in a screenplay, but it also implicates us in the story and the viewing of it, which can be quite disturbing, particularly in the case of Eri as I mentioned earlier.

I’d recommend After Dark as an unsettling, thought-provoking novel that raises questions of freedom and conformity, social conventions, gender relations, violence and voyeurism, and more. I haven’t read enough of Murakami to know where it sits within his overall body of work, but I plan to read more soon, so please leave your Murakami recommendations in the comments. Also, this feels like a book with many possible interpretations, so if you have a different view of it, please share it below.

I read this book for Japanese Literature Challenge 18. It’s going on for the rest of January and February, so why not join in? Or you can read some of my past contributions here:

• The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
• Ms Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami
• Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
• The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata
• The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon
• The Great Passage by Shion Miura