By Franklin Harris
fharris@decaturdaily.com· 340-2394

Describing the plot of any Haruki Murakami novel is a tricky proposition. For Murakami, plot is often beside the point. It just gets in his way.

That’s true whether Murakami is telling a simple love story, constructing an elaborate fantasy or inserting a talking frog into an otherwise ordinary tale of contemporary life.

It’s also true of his latest book, “After Dark,” which comes in at under 200 pages and takes place entirely during one night in a Tokyo entertainment district.

We follow several characters as their lives intersect, sometimes in unexpected ways, but Murakami gives us a peek only at those few hours from midnight until dawn.

The characters

In a reversal of stereotype, we meet a young musician, Tetsuya Takahashi, who dreams of becoming a lawyer. On his way to rehearsal, he stops at a Denny’s where he encounters a girl, Mari, whom he has briefly met before. Years earlier, he dated Mari’s older sister, Eri.

Eri, meanwhile, is in bed asleep, which is where she has been for months, as if she simply doesn’t want to wake up. But as she sleeps, the television in her room switches on by itself, and a faceless man watches from the other side of the screen. Suddenly, Murakami’s story, which seems like Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” minus Bill Murray, runs off the path and into David Lynch territory.

In fact, “After Dark” is self-consciously cinematic. Murakami continually asks us to imagine ourselves as a camera panning over the city, fading to black to end one scene and fading in to begin another.

Eri drifts ever deeper into sleep, and possibly into another world. Elsewhere, Takahashi and Mari’s chance meeting spawns a series of connections, starting when Kaoru, a friend of Takahashi’s, asks Mari for help with a Chinese prostitute left battered and naked in a room in Kaoru’s “love hotel.” (A love hotel, by the way, is exactly what you think it is.)

As we go along, Murakami’s players offer observations on life and love, and mysteries arise only to remain stubbornly unsolved.

“After Dark” is a pleasant experience, but a trivial one when compared to Murakami’s other works. By writing a novel that’s almost a screenplay, Murakami has sacrificed the written word’s ability to go deeper than film. The result is a nice enough story, but it probably would have made a far better movie.

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