After Dark with Murakami
Many of us are excited about Stephenie Meyer’s upcoming Breaking Dawn. Her Twilight series is Harry Potter huge—even if the latest cover of Entertainment magazine was slightly unnerving. Does Robert Pattinson really need to look so pale in order to play Edward Cullen?
This week I’d like to mention another author whose latest work always gets me excited—and which always gets purchased as soon as it’s available: Haruki Murakami, possibly the best known Japanese writer of fiction here in North America.
Recently I finished his 2007 work, After Dark. (PopMatter’s review is here.) It’s more like a novella than a fully fleshed out Murakami novel. I enjoy his magical realism style, and the fact that he always surprises me. I can never tell what is going to happen because much of the action is illogical, or completely bizarre. Elements of the supernatural, and unlikely coincidences of connection are par for the course.
After Dark takes place in the middle of the night in Tokyo, when most people are safely ensconced in their homes, sleeping quietly in preparation for a new day, and unaware of the frequent strangeness of the nighttime hours. The book presents a community of those who are more at ease when day turns into night; their stories are loosely interconnected. Here, Murakami writes as though he perceives the action as a screenplay. The narrative voice is like a camera, moving about the scenes, cutting from location to location, deliberately including some angles and excluding other portions of the set.
An initially unremarkable young woman, Mari, spends her nighttime hours avoiding company and reading in a fast food restaurant, while her sleeping beauty sister, Eri, lies at home in perfect repose—which has lasted for two months. Mari is asked by a complete stranger who has heard she speaks Chinese to come to a love-hotel and translate for a Chinese prostitute who has been attacked by a client who conforms to every stereotype of the typical hardworking Japanese businessman, except for his tendency to savage violence. Meanwhile, in Eri’s room, tidy and austere but for the lovely girl sound asleep in the bed, some sort of electric energy has entered the chamber and the accompanying current threatens to either disturb her unfathomable sleep, or to harm her as she lies innocently at peace.
After Dark, things are not as they seem, and Murakami never offers an explanation for the strangeness of the Tokyo night, as these stories are loosely interwoven.
Kafka on the Shore which was published in translation in 2006, was my first and remains my favorite Murakami novel. Since a friend lent me The Elephant Vanishes, a short story collection from 1994, I have been totally hooked and read just about everything Murakami has written that is available in English.
Who is your favorite foreign-language author?
Comments
Mine is also Murakami, but you must check out his “Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” It’s definitely one of the stranger works I’ve read, but also one of the most wonderful.
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Comment by Melissa — July 14, 2008 @ 8:53 pm
I assume that everyone has read Gunter Grass, Garcia Marquez, Ivan Klima, Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Bolaņo, & Luisa Valenzuela. That should be a given. And add Kobe Abe and Murakami.
Murakami’s great, dittisimo HARDBOILED WONDERLAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD, KAFKA ON THE SHORE. & ELEPHANT VANISHES.
I edit a multilingual magazine & website, & I do lots of translation (usually of Croatian & Spanish, usually), & all sorts of linguistic fossicking, having just published a 90-language dictionary & phrasebook of insults & invective & blasphemies (CURSE AND BERATE IN 69+ LANGUAGES), so, from my internationalist perch:
I have a superbaker’s dozen to recommend. Read 3 or 4 of these writers & the locals just might not cut it:
(1) Karel Capek… Czech writer, & a major influence on Vonnegut, & he died just before Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Capek wrote a play called RUR, & coined the term robot, & wrote amazing short story collections like: CROSSROADS, TALES FROM 2 POCKETS, APOCRYPHAL TALES. Eat your heart out, all you flashfiction wannabes, Capek did it 90 to 70 years ago…
(2) Etgar Keret, Israeli short short story writer: THE NIMROD FLIP OUT, THE GIRL ON THE FRIDGE… 2 great collections of very short stories that sneak up on you & hit you on the head & make you larf & cry & larf again… And his wife is a stage director & filmmaker & is starting to make his stories into films. If you get a chance, see JELLYFISH, which deals with contemporary Tel Aviv…an interesting movie, based on some terrific linked short stories….
(3) Daniel Chavarria, Uruguayan writer, who writes hardboiled Latin American magical mysteries… ADIOS MUCHACHOS, TANGO FOR A TORTURER…
(4) Ferida Durakovic, Bosnian poet, short story writer, & essayist. She worked at a bookstore for donkey’s years, until twas bombed. When her house was bombed she could only save 2 volumes: WAR PEACE, and LORD OF THE RINGS. Her collection of poems, HEART OF DARKNESS, is fantastic. But for the grace of god, this could be our fate. (Discolsure & Confession, I have published one of her short stories…)
(5) Dominique Fabre, French novelist. THE WAITRESS WAS NEW. One of those beautifully French books about the days in the life of a bartender and the failing bistro he helps run in a Parisian suburb, of his days at work, & his days in his apartment, of his relationships with neighbors, friends, customers, & it is really funny, sometimes haha funny, sometimes peculiar funny, and always ringing true. At 117 pages, it is perfectly pitched, giving you a time, a place, & a few people. It is done with a really light, subtle, and deft touch. But don’t drink white wine while reading it, though. As Bette Davis said, “White wine is for phonies.” But if you must, do not, do nut ask for Chardonnay…
(6) Jorge Franco, Columbian novelist, part of the CRACK generation, which rejected the magical realist effects. ROSARIO TIJERAS, which was a bestseller in the US in both English AND Spanish editions, is the sort of book that if made into a movie would have starred Joan Crawford & James Spader & Jimmy Stewart, & would have been directed by both Cronenberg & Lynch, & would be rated NC-17…. What do you do when your whole city, your whole society is one big crack house, & you are in love with one of its enforcers?
(7) Dubravka Oraic Tolic, Croatian essayist. Her best book is 20th CENTURY THROUGH A REAR VIEW MIRROR, but only parts of it have been published, bilingually in English & Croatian. (Disclosure & Confession, we helped get this collection published by printing her other works in my magazine, Gobshite Quarterly, & we will continue to post more bis online.)
(8) Vangeis Hatziyannidis, Greek noveist. His book, FOUR WALLS, takes place on an isolated greek island. It is an amazing book, relatively short, but containing details about beekeeping & honeymaking & the Greek Orthodox monastic life & domestic violence & child abuse that has more plot reversals & switchbacks, that ACTUALY work, than LOLITA, and THE 3RD MAN, and CHINATOWN combined.
(9) Pawel Huelle, Polish essayist, playwright, novelist, journalist. MERCEDES-BENZ is 154-pages of Arabian Nights magic… A guy at the end of the eastern bloc Communist rule takes driving lessons & falls platonically, but still falls for his female driving instructor. She has a severely handicapped brother, & he has stories about his family & their special multi-generation relationship with the Mercedes-Benz automobile, from the rise of Nazism to the rise & fall of Communism…. The book is motherfucker funny & shitheel-bastard heartbreaking, because that is what the 20th. C. did to these basically decent people. MERCEDES-BENZ is easilly one of the best books I have read in the past 20 years, fiction or nonfiction, any category.
(10) Yasmina Khadra, Algerian mystery writer. MORITURI is basically your old-fashioned Marxist real-estate western (an Australian-created sub-genre), involving your usual burntout cops & ethical drug dealers & drag queens & arms traffikers, & the kidnapping of a power-broker’s daughter. People have compared him to Chandler, & he does have some of those wisecracks, but the humor is drier, closer to Hammett.
(11) Alexander Ikonnikov, Russian novelist. LIZKA & HER MEN is a very breezy & entertaining satire of perestroika USSR, & post USSR Russia. Think BRIDGET JONES DIARY with psychotic Czechian-war veterans & a super-depressed economy. Very snarky & the political satire sneaks up on you & bites your ass, even with its happyhappyhappy marrying-the-drunken-poet ending…
(12) Gordan Nuhanovic. Croatian short story writer. THE SURVIVAL LEAGUE is a great collection. Titles like THE FIRST AND LAST PUNKER and HOW I TRANSCENDED TRICHINOSIS exemplify & encapsulate a post-Yugoslavian-post-Communist-post-war-Croatia. (Disclosure & confession, we published a few of his shor stories & got him the much deserved attention for publication of his shor story collection.)
(13) Edo Popovich, Croatian journalist & novelist & short story writer. ZAGREB EXIT SOUTH splits the difference betwen a short story cycle & an actual novel, & one of the main viewpoint characters is a journalist which allows Popovich to frame the story without preaching or melodrama. The spirit is closer to Lou Reed or Charles Bukowski. All this civil war shite is causing beer shortages—& we can’t have that, can we? Still, people use the internet as an escape valve, with sometimes raunchy & hilarious results….
(14) Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Spanish-born Mexican novelist & essayist & journalist. I would reccomend THE UNCONFORTABLE DEAD (his murder mystery written in alternate chapters with Subcomandante Marcos), & ‘68, his memoir about the massacre during the 1968 Mexico City Olympics where 800+ protestors & innocent bystanders & US & European tourists & journalists were killed by the military. I mean, that can never happen here, can it?
(15) Elif Shafak, Turkish journalist & novelist.
THE GAZE. Not quite magical realist, & post-feminist in interesting ways. The two main characters are a fat woman & her dwarf lover, who challenge society by trying to switch roles & turn the tables. There are counterplots, a metadictionary of gazes & rules for looking at people, & a history of a 19th c. freak show that was the toast of Istanbul. It is To the writer’s credit that her plot never feels meta-, or contrived. She does overdo some psychological motivation, but not too much, & not enough to really damage what is a really interesting book that offers promises of a great writer.
(16) Genichiri Takahashi, Japanese critic & novelist. SAYONARA GANGSTERS is one of those odd & very entertaining books that you almost take for granted (& there are echoes of Brautigan & Vonnegut, & Hunter S. Thompson) but after all the razzle dazzle & metagames with paranoid refrigerators & an even more paranoid sociey, you are left with a tale, a narrative of a man who went too far, & who faced real consequences, & paid a price, & the book really tugs at you, & is tragic & heartbreaking & fucked in the best way. Getting any more specific would give too much of the game away.
Comment by rv branham — July 16, 2008 @ 3:41 am