By Haruki Murakami
I read this on the bus to London on the 17th of July 2024.
I liked it! The book is nominally a set of three stories about people in Tokyo over the course of a single winter night, but it’s written with such atmosphere and allusion that it’s hard to say whether it’s real or a dream, a simple set of events or a giant allegory for sleep, or identity, or dissociation, or anything else.
The plot thread with Eri Asai, the girl who has been asleep for two months, is the most elusive one. The others are entwined: Mari, her sister, stays awake most of the night and meets a student, a trombone player, and they have a Before Sunrise-style wander through the city. She meets the owner of a love hotel, and helps a young Chinese escort who has been beaten badly by the third character, a Patrick Bateman-style software engineer who works nights.
The narrative voice is incredibly distinctive - Murakami at several points describes the reader’s POV in detail, treating us as the disembodied camera in a movie, present to observe but never to interfere, flying to places that may or may not exist. He loves his tell-not-show style especially, perhaps in an attempt to imitate a film director or script describing each shot. At several points he outlines uncertainties and tells us what we should learn from each scene or character. I suppose it’s a stylistic choice, not one I particularly liked, but it did have the effect of heightening the filmlike quality of the novel, as well as emphasising the contrast between the clear experiences of the reader, and the murky, confusing, chaotic “reality” the characters find themselves in.
His characterisation is also good, he examines the sisterly relationship between Eri and Mari with compassion and insight, as one between a pretty, outgoing older sister and an introverted one, who used to be close but drifted apart, and live different lives.
It’s also a look at cities as living beings, between the day and night, composed of faceless and unique individuals, who are swallowed and helpless to its whims, and yet manage to eke out a sometimes happy existence just before the paper-thin wall dividing them from the darkness and the cracks.
The book reminded me of Gaiman’s Neverwhere and his Sandman comic about the man who wakes into the city’s dream, Pratchett’s conception of cities, and the disassociation and impersonality of Perfect Blue.