John Freeman

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows," said Oberon to Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." "Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows." In Shakespeare's time, riverbanks might have held miraculous, strange things. But in the twenty-first century this kind of magic blooms more often in our cities, which blaze on through the night, circadian rhythms be damned.

In "After Dark," Haruki Murakami gives these metropolises their modern day "Midsummer's Night Dream." The action unfolds in the all-night diners and love hotels of contemporary Tokyo, between midnight and 5am. The only pixies are the immigrant hotel workers who clean up a mess left by a john who beat up his date for the night.

The book begins cinematically with our point of view unfolding as if from a hand-held camera. "In our broad sweep," Murakami writes, panning the skyline, "the city looks like a single gigantic creature--or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms."

Like Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," the book then zeros in on a handful of those "intertwining" lives. Here are the prostitutes, students, hotel employees and Chinese mafioso who people the Tokyo night. In a daring, surrealist twist, there is also a beautiful model who went to sleep months ago and refuses to wake up.

Murakami once ran a jazz club and has spoken of how that music's premium on improvisation influenced his writing. More than anything he has written to date, "After Dark" showcases that cross-current: even if the book wasn't written like a jazz solo, "After Dark" feels spontaneous, improvised. It gives the impression anything could happen.

What's remarkable is how efficiently "After Dark" lures us into this fugue state. Murakami has delicately retooled his prose to noir-like brevity. Sentence fragments, short declarative statements and an abundance of dialogue makes the novel move along swiftly, surface and undercurrent creating an atmosphere of lonely menace.

"The room is dark," Murakami writes, describing a salary man who has roughed up a prostitute and then heads back to work to finish a night shift. "Only the area around the man's desk receives illumination from fluorescent lights on the ceiling. This could be an Edward Hopper painting titled Loneliness."

"After Dark" makes frequent use of such tableaus, pausing between bursts of conversation between characters to linger on the minute details of, say, a sleeping woman, a park, a 7-Eleven at 4am. "All kinds of stuff is scattered on the street: aluminum beer cans, a trampled evening newspaper, a crushed cardboard box."

Murakami's characters feel not unlike this detritus--lifted up and scattered about--and yet he wrings some pathos from their collisions here. Hotel workers take care of a prostitute; a student is fetched from the Denny's to translate (since the prostitute only speaks Chinese); the young musician who is the conduit between these worlds briefly falls for the student.

It's extremely difficult to write this well--and this lightly--about such a disparate cast, and still make it matter. In a few hours, there will be a new day, and the one Murakami's characters are leaving will be mostly erased. Workers will begin hustling to the underground. As Murakami writes, "the new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts."

And yet, it is during this in-between time that the dark-side of love stalks romance most thrillingly. So it's important to slow down and give it a long-lens gaze. With "After Dark," Murakami gives this time its due, and its story. The novel will most certainly last until the next morning, and the next and the next.

"After Dark"

By Haruki Murakami

Translated by Jay Rubin

Alfred A. Knopf, $22, 191 pages

(2007-05-22)

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