The other late-night types she meets are clichés, from whores with a heart of gold to gangster pimps. A jazz trombonist, Takahashi, who was once smitten with Eri, becomes Mari’s affectionate confidant. Instead she stays awake, reading an unidentified book in a Denny’s restaurant in a seedy part of town, where she runs into a midnight world of prostitutes, musicians, and barkeeps. Traumatized by her sister’s fate, Mari doesn’t want to sleep, at least at night.

Predictably, there is no Prince Charming to rescue Eri, only her sister, Mari, who hasn’t her sibling’s looks but compensates with a nimble intellect. Eri’s death-in-life plight lends the book some memorably creepy moments (“Eri Asai is in a deep, deliberate state of sleep as if her entire body had been enveloped in warm wax.”), but the author’s meditations-on-it-all are dipped in clammy pretension: “Our point of view draws back through the vacuum of nothingness.” At one point, transported into her television, Eri wakes up to stare, with numbed horror, through the screen into her bedroom. Murakami suggests that Eri may be trapped in a sort of electronic dream loop, presided over by an enigmatic Man with No Face. She exists in a weird sleepwalking daze, getting up to eat and defecate before hitting the sack again.

The story’s ultimate snoozer, the young and beautiful fashion model Eri, went to sleep one night two months before the book begins and didn’t wake up. Those not busy trying to stay awake are busy dreaming their lives away. In After Dark, Murakami’s characters are so somnambulistic they are in danger of snoring off into nothingness. Since the “ever after” archetypes are just as attenuated, the predominant effect is alienation round-the-clock, the story’s bedeviled characters drifting through a neon-lit netherworld, unconscious of how out of touch they are with their real selves and desires. Murakami’s fables ask fascinating questions about how runaway technology and rampant consumerism mold humanity: Will traditional conceptions of human identity survive? If not, what will take their place? The problem, at least in the novella length After Dark, is that the author’s characters come into the world so hollowed out they have very little ego to lose. His fiction’s amalgamation of the antique and the latest thing is what makes him such an attractive but frustrating figure, a with-it wizard who promises to connect, in his latest book, Dreamweaver, Sleeping Beauty, and the Twilight Zone. Haruki Murakami is a hip cultural diagnostician who would like to be viewed as a melancholic poet of the postmodern condition, a writer who has one foot in fairy tale spells, the other in technological detritus. In his critically acclaimed novels and stories, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami sings of the subterranean connections between software and the supernatural.

After dark haruki murakami book review