Murakami It is one of those authors who cause a certain respect among those who do not know their work. The novels of the Japanese writer have a reputation for confusing, pretentious, and strange. After all, to the usual misunderstanding that is reading (during which we inaccurately reinterpret someone else's words) we must add the obvious cultural differences. The Japanese neither think nor feel like the Europeans. This is embodied in the need for notes in your books to explain terms like hikikomori, otaku: kokoro.
However, getting into the narrative of Haruki Murakami it is much easier than it may sound. And in most cases a very pleasant experience. For this, I recommend the short novel After Dark (After dark Afutā Daku in Japanese), named after jazz song Five Spot After Darkby Curtis Fuller. This piece permeates the just over 240 pages of a novel that gently but firmly leads us by the hand through the lively Tokyo night. In the worst case scenario, it will help us to know whether or not we agree with the author. Even if most will fall in love with the dream world of Murakami.
Jazz, cats and darkness
Large arcades packed with youth. Loud electronic sounds. Groups of university students returning from a party. Teenagers with dyed blonde hair and sturdy legs peeking out from under the miniskirt. Clerks in suits running across the crossroads so as not to miss the last train. Even now, the claims of karaoke continue to cheerfully invite you in. […] We are at the end of autumn. The wind is not blowing, but the air is cold. In a very short time a new day will begin.
With these phrases Murakami leads us through the streets of tokyo. The novel unfolds during a single night, in the third person, and with a cinematographic language, as if we were seeing the action through a camera. On the other hand, the chapters, instead of name, show a clock that marks the time in which the events occur.
The story begins when Mari asai, a nineteen-year-old student, agrees with Takahashi tetsuya, jazz musician, over coffee at Denny's. Soon they discover that they had met before, during a double date in which his sister participated, eri asai. As a result of this encounter, Mari will live different experiences with other people, apparently fortuitous, while her sister remains in a world closer to dreams than to reality.
Cover of the MaxiTusquets edition of After Dark in Spanish.
This is the storyline of the novel, which doesn't really matter that much. What makes the story memorable are its lengths and charismatic dialoguesalong with its dark world of bittersweet decay. All adorned with jazz (Murakami is a declared music lover), girls with colored hair, and cats. I recommend not looking for more information about his argument and let the story itself surprise us.
Two sides of the same coin
For people, memories are the fuel that allows them to continue living. And for the maintenance of life it does not matter if those memories are worth it or not. They are simple fuel.
Leather After Dark It is like reading two books interspersed that in the end are related to each other. The first shows the manners of Tokyo's nightlife, the little miseries of the souls that stir in the Japanese capital, along with dialogues about what is the best dish in a restaurant that seems out of movies like Pulp Fiction. These conversations, although apparently trivial, end up gradually letting us know what the characters are like:
"I'm short, with little chest, hair full of swirls, my mouth too big and, on top of that, I have myopia and astigmatism.
Kaoru smiles.
"People call that 'personality'. Each one is as it is.
The other book is much more complex and dark. The dialogues give way to precise descriptions that show us what Eri Asai does, or perhaps dreams. These passages disturb the reader, but manage to arouse his curiosity. All of them are based on the following quote:
The mask combines, in equivalent doses, magic and functionality. They have bequeathed it to us from ancient times together with darkness, it has been sent to us from the future with light.
What in the context of the novel symbolizes the guy shock, who carries the mythological and historical heritage of his lineage, with the modern world. In our days there is no longer the unitary idea of the self, so in vogue before the XNUMXth century. Human self-awareness is divided, and the mask represents one of those parts of our self, the one that hides all the others.
In short: anyone can find something interesting in the novel, be it one of its faces, the other, or both. For all this, and much more, I highly recommend reading After Dark de Haruki Murakami.