Now that that’s over with, I can review the backlog of things I read in between chapters and while avoiding the BAM challenge review. We’ll start with After Dark, by Haruki Murakami.

This reading choice began as a New Year’s resolution – I would spend 2008 reading 50 fiction titles from the New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2007” list. (Since that works out to about a book a week, I’m already ten behind, and it’s become increasinly clear that this is yet another resolution failure.) I’d already read Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and enjoyed it, so it seemed like another of his books would be a good starting point on the list.

The basic premise is one of paired opposites. Eri is a legendary beauty, who has been modeling since childhood; her only path to success in life is created by her face, and she knows this. Her sister Mari is plain looking, but bright and hardworking. She’s fluent in Chinese and pours her entire self into reading and studying. Then there’s another opposition between them: Mari is kept awake all night by an unidentifiable restlessness, while Eri has been asleep for the past three months.

Chapters alternate between between Eri’s still, small room and Mari’s long, wakeful night, where she encounters a number of odd characters. They include a jazz trombonist, practicing (for perhaps the last time) until dawn; a manager of a seedy love hotel and the two overnight maids; a foreign-born prostitute who’s little better than enslaved; and the prostitute’s cold, violent client, who is tied in some way to Eri’s endless sleep. Each one exists in their lonely nighttime world for a different reason, some choosing the dark out of hope or fear, others forced there by their unacceptability to the daylight masses.

As with Kafka, both the author and translator’s strength lies in the ability to deliver both day-to-day moments and wildly surreal tangents in the same manner: the focus of the narrative eye on each scene is intense, but what is seen is always reported in the most matter-of-fact manner. The story moves seamlessly from Eri’s dreams to Mari’s reality, through the bizarre and the humdrum moments of each. The narrative watches all with a calm bordering on indifference, and yet manages to provide the tiny, incidental details that make characters and scenes feel real and whole. No opinion or interpretation is given, because none is needed; the observations provided by the narrative voice complete the scene without any “dear reader” intrusions.

This one is readable by older teens to adults (fair warning: unlike most novels written for teens, you’re left with a handful of story threads to tie together yourself, so don’t expect a ton on finality from the ending) and an accessible starting point for someone interested in modern literary fiction.