What Happens in Tokyo After Midnight?

After Dark, by Haruki Murakami, was an overall easy read with the relatively simplistic sentence structure. However, I didn’t really enjoy the content of the book. The story took place in the exciting city of Tokyo, but chose to focus on the lonely hours between midnight and dawn. The point of view seems omniscient, but readers do not gain insight to the thoughts of the characters- only through their actions. The nighttime seemed to create a balance between reality and fantasy. Mari’s interactions with other characters are perfectly normal, while her sister Eri’s transport into a room of another dimension within her TV is completely surreal.

I think the only gripping scene for me was when Mari helped the injured Chinese prostitute at a love hotel. Maybe it was through the violence of it all, but the story seemed to progress much faster during that part of the plot. After that scene, the story just kept on getting more eerie. The man who abused the prostitute also turns out to be the man who stares at Eri Asai through a TV screen/weird transport portal. There also seemed to be random scenes interspersed throughout the story- characters buying milk, or a creepy man working alone in a dimly lit office, or shots of a soundly sleeping Eri and a flickering TV screen. Perhaps the scenes were symbolic, but in my opinion, these parts detracted from the underlying meaning of the story. I felt like I was reading about observations that had been made from surveillance cameras placed in very personal locations.