In Haruki Murakami’s novel, After Dark, we are brought into the depths of Tokyo, a city known for its fast-paced lifestyle and modernity. In the novel, Murakami employs a unique form of narrative, engaging the reader in a shot by shot journey through scenes taking place from midnight to dawn.
In the midst of the city’s frequently busy streets, offices, family restaurants, and convenience stores, we witness how the darkness of night envelops and penetrates a familiar world. During this period, when the east side of the earth has its face turned from the sun, everything changes in the city.An atmosphere of eeriness takes over, as if the blanket of daylight has been removed to reveal the world that lies beneath it. Through the lives of the characters and their encounters, the novel presents the unseen realm in what we know as “reality”. In the criticism book entitled, The Theory of the Simulacrum, it is conceived that the city is a “field of vision”, a “mode of seeing”, or a “structure of visibility.”(Seats 2006: 90) Indeed, as we experience Murakami’s unconventional style of writing, the city is presented to us as such.
It is noticeable that settings and scenarios are described to the detail. When we encounter Mari, for example, the Denny’s is presented with intricacy, to the point that it appears to us as something real.Nevertheless, the novel’s theme presents the seemingly unreal within the real—for us to ponder on what indeed “real” truly is. In the novel, we see how darkness permits the breaking of the cyclic daily life of human beings. Kaoru, the manager of a love hotel can take it easy and drink a couple of beers while on duty. A bartender who doesn’t mind taking time to change LP’s says, “Look, it’s the middle of the night.
There won’t be any trains running till morning.What’s the hurry?” (Murakami 2007: 64) Without trains running and people rushing, all is quiet, and a sense of temporary freedom lingers. For several hours, there seems to be no rule, no cycle, the world is unpredictable and free from the mechanism of daytime. This mechanism is strongly symbolized in a film briefly discussed in the novel.Mari, the nineteen-year-old girl seen hanging out at night and reading her book, tells Kaoru about the film, Alphaville, as “an imaginary city in the near future.
” (2007: 59) In that city, “. . . you’re not allowed to have deep feelings. So there’s nothing like love. No contradictions, no irony.
They do everything according to numeric formulas.” (2007:60)The thesis of this paper is: “Although After Dark presents characters and encounters within a normative setting, nevertheless, it also symbolically depicts a dystopian world like Alphaville, reflecting issues that arise in modern society, such as the vagueness of existence and dissolution of individuality.”Although compared to the city in the novel, Alphaville seems extreme, the scenarios, encounters, and conversations in the novel implicitly express parallelism between the two. It is only in the dark that “irony” becomes possible. Irony, as Mari explains, “means taking an objective or inverted view of oneself or of something belonging to oneself and discovering oddness in that.
” (2007: 60)In such a world as Alphaville, where there is no room for irony, all things are perceived at face value. Therefore, existence is controlled and identity is eliminated. In the same way, we find the characters of After Dark in individual struggles with issues of existence and identity.These two themes permeate the slideshow of incidents from nighttime to daylight. In correlation to the discussion on the city as simulacrum, it is said that “the city is a system of control, which masks, contains, and disperses forces of aggression and chaos, ‘telematically’ (from a distance).
The city is both utopian and dystopian.” (2007: 94)Alphaville depicts a world where existence has been reduced to some form of machinery. Everything, as Mari explains, is done as dictated by formula. Lucien Goldmann, a sociologist who studied the novel form during the early capitalist period in European society, echoes this in his book Towards a Sociology of the Novel.
As the individual of a capitalist society pursues the goal of market production, he is overcome by the goal itself, capitalism, and industrialization. In such a society, there is no place for the qualitative values the individual holds. As Goldmann explains:“…the whole set of fundamental values in the psychical life, values that in precapitalist society were—and, in future forms will be, we hope—constituted by trans-individual feelings (morality, aesthetics, charity, and faith) disappears from individual consciousness in the economic sector, whose weight and importance are constantly increasing in the social life, and delegates its functions to a new property of inert objects—their price.” (1975: 137)
