I Have a Crush on Mari Arai

About a month ago I read After Dark by Haruki Murakami

The book sped by pretty quickly and kept my interest well enough. The interspliced chapters involving the TV in a sleeping girl's room, unplugged, but mysteriously on, with a figure in a chair on the screen, masked with a strange filmy substance across his face, watching the girl through the screen, are reminiscent of elements of Lost Highway or Mulholland Dr.

The translation captures SO much about Japan, but I wonder if that's because I've been here. I think so, in many ways. Murakami uses just enough to evoke certain images, and though the book is set in Tokyo, I know the same sorts of places in Osaka and it all comes together in my head very clearly. The setting for this book is very similar to the neighborhood in Osaka where I DJ once a month.

In the end, it's kind of sentimental. That's not unusual with Murakami, who seems to be a sort of nostalgia junkie and has this sense of sappiness that is overwhelmingly Japanese. Some things seem created for the sole purpose of producing the sense of 懐かしい - natsukashii, a sense of melodramatic nostalgia and reminiscence, and Murakami taps into that often in his books.

I read many reviews that really panned this book and trashed it. Since I've only read one of his novels (his first, Hear the Song of the Wind / Listen to the Wind Sing, not available in the USA) and some short stories (from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, I didn't walk in with any expectations - which seems to be a big part of what turned off many readers, especially fans of Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The plot is pretty thin, for sure. It's an interesting exercise in changing perspective, and it's really a set of intertwine analogies about the modern urban Japanese condition.

I liked it. But I didn't love it. I did, however, come to really like the main character, Mari Arai.