Murakami Haruki. After Dark

I wrote this review last summer and realized that the translation hadn't come out yet. The translation is due out in May, and is by Jay Rubin, a guy I hugely respect for both his translations and his book on Japanese grammar.

Murakami tends towards two extremes: the dark, sensitive, just slightly political writer of realistic novels of bleakness and doomed relationships (see Norwegian Wood) and the very clever and weird (perhaps too clever and weird) writer of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Afterdark straddles those extremes; reminiscent of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, it's the story of a shy intellectual student girl (Mari) and a gregarious "kind-hearted but disobedient mutt" of a jazz trombonist (Takahashi). They met once on a very awkward double date, two years ago; they meet again at midnight, in a Denny's. They go their separate ways, and then they get pulled together again.

There is another plotline going on, a stranger one. It starts in the room of Mari's sister Eri, who is asleep, and then the weird stuff starts in.

No one kills themselves, the female characters are something more than a projection of Murakami's fears and desires, and it's relentlessly likable in a way that Murakami's fiction usually isn't. There's something adorable about Takahashi and Mari, and the interplay of dialogue between them. (Yes, a novel with a subplot revolving around the rap of a Chinese prostitute is lighter fare than Murakami's usual.)

There are also some strands of plot that never go anywhere, and some sections that are clearly filler.

Two things I especially liked about it: first, the way that the story played with the little moments when two people can either connect or pass each other by unknowingly. And, in those moments, the possibility of really connecting with someone. Second, the way the story plays out in love hotels, convenience stores, an office building, a Denny's, the kind of places that are soulless blights on Japan. But--within those places, there is a way to find something soulful and real.