"After Dark"

Fuck you Murakami. How can you just make it work?

Not really a novel, not plotted, not important, really, in the long run, no grand themes or messages, no passages of amazing beauty, won't really have an effect on my life. Still, "After Dark" is incredibly put together. Dammit, it's different. Of course.

It takes place in the course of a single night, starting in a Dennys after all other restaurants are closed. Every chapter heading is a clock, and the upper corner of the page keeps track of the time, minute by minute. It's not the most important night ever--the most interesting thing to happen is in the second chapter, when a prostitute is beaten--but otherwise its all conversations of people getting more and more tired in various all night places, awake for no particular or important reason. The fact that all the characters but one are awake through the night juxtaposes an odd character who we return to every few chapters who is asleep, and (SPOILER ALERT) we learn has been for the last two months. (END SPOILER)

The narrator is fascinating here. All-seeing third-person narrators are pretty stock, but Murakami makes his narrator very specifically into a film camera, or some equivalent, a semi-disinterested point in the air that he moves around very deliberately, saying things like, "we observe her sleeping, changing angles at regular intervals". And always, it's "we". Along with the prominence of technology like TVs and cell phones, it gives it a very night-bathed-in-green-light-from-Matrix-computer-screen feel without being cheesy or science fiction-y. Very cinematic.