55 pages • 1 hour read
Haruki MurakamiAfter Dark
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Midnight approaches on an autumn night in Tokyo. Murakami describes a bird’s-eye view of the metropolis, focusing in on the amusement district: A young woman sits reading a large novel at a crowded Denny’s restaurant, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, occasionally looking out the second-story window.
A thin young man with long, tangled hair, carrying a wind instrument in a case, walks into Denny’s. He thinks he recognizes the young woman; questioning her, he realizes she is Mari Asai, his friend Eri’s little sister. He invites himself to sit down with her, saying he has to meet someone soon. The young man orders chicken salad and toast, the only thing he considers worth eating at Denny’s.
The young man reminds Mari that they had met before: two years ago, when Mari was in high school. His friend was dating Eri. The four of them went to a pool; Mari ordered peach melba. Mari asks why he remembers that particular detail. He says it is because it was an odd thing to order and because he thought she was cute.
Mari does remember him; he has a characteristic deep scar on his cheek from a bicycle accident as a child. He tells her that he was close to losing his eye in the accident, and it also deformed his earlobe. The young man receives his food and complains to Mari that Denny’s never makes his toast crispy enough.
The young man recalls how pretty Eri was; Mari asks why he prefers to use past tense. He claims Eri is a matter of intellectual curiosity for him. He wonders how it would be to date a girl as pretty as Eri. He had been paired with Mari on the double date at the pool, but he still thought she was cute. Mari had seemed reluctant to talk; Eri had told the young man that Mari never takes the initiative to talk to anybody, and that she prefers to speak in Chinese rather than Japanese.
Mari tells him she does not remember his name; he replies that he understands—his name is ordinary and forgettable. The young man remembers that Eri did not swim that day, but Mari did; he reflects on how strange it is that siblings can be so different from each other. He tells her a lengthy story from Hawaiian myth about three brothers told by the gods to push boulders up a mountain. Mari will not tell him the title of her large book. He finishes his food in silence.
The young man notes that Mari has missed the last train and will have to wait until dawn to get home, when the commuter lines start running again. She knows. He tells her he plays in a band that is allowed to practice in a local building’s basement. Mari correctly identifies his instrument as a trombone. He is impressed she could recognize it; he does not think most girls would. She asks why he decided to play trombone. He tells her he was inspired by Curtis Fuller playing trombone on the jazz song “Five Spot After Dark.” He hums a few bars of the song and is surprised again when Mari recognizes it and hums along.
The young man decides it is time to go. He tells Mari that it is much easier to talk to her than Eri. He asks her if there is something wrong at home keeping her out all night, but she doesn’t answer. He gives her his phone number, guessing correctly that she does not have a cell phone. The young man tells her he will likely be back around 5am and that he hopes to see her again.
Chapter 2 Summary
At 11:57pm, Eri Asai lies in a deep, almost unnatural sleep. She “seems to have been placed upon the narrow threshold that separates the organic from the inorganic” (30). Murakami describes the scene from the perspective of a camera scanning the room for details. The narrator includes the audience in its observations: “We” watch her sleep and “we” examine her bedroom. It is sparsely decorated, except for five photographs of Eri from modeling sessions. Her room is set up to “hide her personality and cleverly elude observing eyes” (33).
At midnight exactly, the unplugged television starts to turn on. It struggles and fails to form an image. Eri remains asleep, oblivious. Unlike the camera/narrator, the television “is undoubtedly trying to intervene. We sense this intuitively” (36).
The image on the television gradually reveals some sort of office or classroom. A man in dark clothes is seated on the room’s single chair. As the image on the screen stabilizes, it is evident that “[s]omething is about to happen in this room. Something of great significance” (37).
Chapter 3 Summary
At 12:25am, Mari is still at Denny’s, reading and ignoring a vegetable sandwich she ordered to buy more time at the restaurant. A large woman sits down at Mari’s table. She tells Mari that Tetsuya Takahashi, the young man with long hair, told her she could find Mari at the restaurant. She asks if Mari can help translate for a woman who speaks no Japanese, since Mari speaks Chinese. The Chinese-speaking woman is hurt and needs help; the large woman promises it will not take much of Mari’s time. Mari hesitates, but the large woman seems trustworthy. She insists on paying for Mari’s bill.
Outside, the large woman introduces herself as Kaoru. Kaoru leads Mari to the Alphaville, the love hotel that she manages. In room 404, Kaoru introduces Mari to two women: Komugi, a woman with dyed red hair whose name means “Wheat,” and Korogi, whose name means “Cricket”—a name she gave herself as an alias. Korogi looks older than Komugi and has a Kansai accent, from the region around Osaka.
The injured woman is a young Chinese sex worker named Guo Dongli. Guo is 19, the same age as Mari. Her face is badly beaten. Guo is reluctant to talk at first, but soon opens up to Mari, revealing that she is from Northern China and that her client flew into a rage and beat her up because her period started right before they were to have sex. The client left without paying the room fee.
Kaoru produces a change of clothes for Guo, and Mari explains the situation. Kaoru tells Mari that Chinese gangsters run the sex work rings on this side of town, and they are much more dangerous and violent than the Japanese Yakuza. Kaoru lets Guo make a call, and soon after a tough-looking man arrives on a motorcycle to fetch her. Kaoru mentions the client’s bill; the man remarks that she has a lot of nerve. The man drops 700 yen on the ground and leaves with Guo, but not before making an insinuated threat about burning Kaoru’s business down.
Chapter 4 Summary
At 12:37pm, little has changed in Eri Asai’s room, except for the man on the television becoming clearer. He is dressed in a worn brown suit, and he appears to be covered in dust and exhausted. His face is obscured by shadows, and he does not move except for the occasional deep breath.
Eventually, the camera reveals that his face is covered in some tight-fitting mask, like plastic wrap; his features are obscured. The mask completely hides the intentions of the Man with No Face, as the narrator dubs him.
The Man with No Face stares determinedly through the glass of the television screen into Eri’s room; he may be staring at Eri herself. It becomes obvious that the “television screen is functioning as a window into this room” (64). The screen flickers and once even momentarily goes out, but the man never stops staring at Eri’s motionless, sleeping form.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
In the first section of After Dark, Murakami populates nighttime Tokyo with a cast of eccentric characters, typical for his style. Mari is the novel’s protagonist. An otherwise normal girl, she links light and dark as an inhabitant of daytime Tokyo staying out all night in a potentially dangerous area. Murakami demonstrates how the character of a city changes after the sun sets. Mari is a diligent college student, and while she may not completely fit in with her peers, she is unaccustomed to the world of nighttime Tokyo. Her initiation is through Kaoru, whose “powerful appearance draws people’s attention” (39). With her shockingly blonde hair and large build, Kaoru sticks out in Denny’s, which still functions as a mainstream space even after midnight. However, she is right at home in the metropolitan night.
In general, characters who are individualistic inhabit nighttime Tokyo, while characters who fit with the collective exist in daytime Tokyo, or at least somewhere between the two. The motif of light and dark thus ties in with the novel’s theme of The Individual and the Collective. This idea is strengthened in the opening scenes, when the narrator describes Tokyo as one large creature made up of a collective of individual parts, which gives off a feeling of “foreboding” as midnight approaches.
Takahashi, whose name is not revealed until Kaoru tells Mari in Chapter 3, is another oddball. His penchant for jazz, and Western media in general, is typical of Murakami’s style, and introduces the novel’s theme of Synchronicity when Mari recognizes his instrument and the song he hums. His tendency to tell long, seemingly tangential stories is also a common occurrence in Murakami’s works. The Hawaiian myth he describes to Mari is a good example of this. Takahashi not only likes hearing himself talk, but the myth of the three brothers also has two morals, which both relate to Mari and foreshadow future events: “The first one [...] is that people are all different. Even siblings […] And the other one […] is that if you really want to know something you have to be prepared to pay the price” (22). The difference between siblings is Mari’s core conflict: her childhood, lived in the shadow of her beautiful sister, Eri, did great damage to her personality and self-esteem. Throughout the course of the night, Mari “pays a price” for learning more about her sister—the price of realizing just what Eri means to her and the pain of understanding how much time they have lost being distant (22).
The novel’s second narrative focuses on Eri Asai, Mari’s sister, who is in a deep, unnatural sleep. These chapters best demonstrate the novel’s theme of Voyeurism and the Narrative Camera, which is introduced at the very beginning of Chapter 1. The narrator takes on the guise of a camera, mimicking stage directions or a film’s screenplay as it examines first Tokyo as a whole, then, later, Eri’s room in minute detail. There is a palpable sense of intrusion in the chapters that focus on Eri, and the narrator involves the reader in this act of voyeurism by using collective pronouns, describing how “[o]ur point of view, as an imaginary camera, picks up and lingers over things in this room. We are invisible, anonymous intruders” (33). Unable to interact with Eri, the camera can only make observations.
From the outset, it is apparent that Eri is a character with an identity conflict. Her sparsely decorated room is not “a room that suggests the tastes or individuality of its occupant” (32). This implies that she has forced herself to belong to the collective, or to obscure her own personality for others; an idea which is strengthened by the presence of the Man with No Face, who watches her in her sleep through the television screen.
Related Titles
By Haruki Murakami
