After dark

Author: [Japan] Haruki Murakami
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: When Norwegian Wood sold over 1 million copies in China, Murakami's latest novel After Dark was introduced to the country. The book not only features the image of Chinese people but also uses symbolism to depict a kind of "evil" hidden deep in Japanese society, implying the author's critique of the Japanese nation and his concerns about where this nation's future is headed. After Dark continues to employ Murakami's signature parallel structure, with the story unfolding from the plot where a girl named Mary, who is about to study in Beijing, helps a Chinese girl who was assaulted by a Japanese man. Unlike the Murakami novels we are familiar with, After Dark no longer creates the loneliness or adventures of the city, nor does it play with solitude. Instead of Western jazz and the gentle rain outside the window, what begins at 11:52 PM in a modern metropolis is the evil—evil that might forever vanish under the night sky of a foreign country because the victim dare not report it, the evil hidden beneath the respectable facade of ordinary people. The story takes place in Tokyo in winter, spanning only seven hours from midnight to 6:07 AM, using a parallel structure to narrate the story of a young sister pair—one sleeping in the dark, the other thinking and acting. The girl is nineteen, beautiful, and a "prostitute" who was smuggled to Japan by illegal Chinese and forced into prostitution. Shortly after the novel begins, a tragic scene occurs: After dark, while working at an love hotel, she is beaten to a pulp by a Japanese man named Shirahawa because she suddenly starts her period, her clothes are stolen, and she is left naked, curled in a corner, stifling her sobs as bloodstains cover the bedsheet. At midnight, the protagonist Mary, who can speak Chinese, is introduced to the hotel manager by a trumpet-playing college student named Takahashi as a translator to handle this "trouble," and the plot unfolds from there. The Shirahawa that Murakami portrays in the book can be said to be a typical "evil" of the Japanese nation. He is dedicated, hardworking, and polite, but his life is rigid, his ideas stubborn, and he remains unfazed after committing violence, continuing to work overtime without any sense of wrongdoing. Renowned translator Professor Lin Shaohua wrote in the postscript: "This kind of evil is different from the evil of terrorists, the evil of authoritarianism, the evil of hegemonism across the Pacific, and the evil of general criminal offenses like murder and arson. It occurs in Japanese society but is not limited to it, making it something we should be more vigilant about." After finishing Kafka on the Shore, Murakami himself expressed that he wanted to write about "evil that is both symbolic and grounded in detailed realism." Ultimately, evil is linked to qualities like meanness, cowardice, and a lack of imagination.