A search for connection and meaning 'After Dark' in Tokyo

Through a series of chance encounters, a Japanese novelist captures the loneliness of modern life.

from the May 15, 2007 edition

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Shortly after her encounter with the trombonist, Mari is joined again at her table at Denny's. This time, the interloper is a large woman with spiky, bleached hair. Kaoru manages a nearby "love hotel" where rooms are rented to couples by the hour. "I've got this Chinese girl in a mess," she tells Mari. She hopes that Mari, who Takahashi has told her is studying Chinese, might be able to translate for her.

Because Murakami's characters are open, trusting souls with no set agenda, Mari follows the affable female, former wrestler to the Hotel Alphaville. She wonders if it's named after Jean-Luc Godard's movie, "Alphaville," about an imaginary city in the near future where you're not allowed to have deep feelings.

Mari feels an uncommon rapport with the beautiful but brutally beaten young Chinese prostitute. She talks to her quietly while Kaoru efficiently cleans her up, gives her some clothes, and calls her pimp to come get her on the same black Honda motorcycle on which he delivered her, "hot n' fresh, like pizza."

With the exception of the pimp, a member of a vicious Chinese gang, Murakami's characters are almost all sympathetic. Murakami tends to withhold moral judgement, even from the emotionally detached businessman who pummeled the prostitute. His impassive narrative lens tracks Shirakawa as he methodically completes his night's work at his office, bothered by "a pain with memories" in his right fist.

Mari's night is part odyssey, part therapy, part love story. Conversations are simultaneously banal and profound, vague and gripping, quotidian and philosophical. Mari and Takahashi "wonder how it turns out that [people] lead such different lives," and they slowly open up to each other.

Others open up to Mari, too. An Alphaville chambermaid encourages her to reconnect with her sister and find the right balance between solitude and community.

Interwoven with Mari's encounters are willfully enigmatic dreamscapes of Eri asleep in her bed, some in her actual room and some inside a television set.

Like a latter-day Walker Percy or Albert Camus, Murakami raises questions about perception and existence, though he feels no compunction to propose answers. For him, the intrigue is in the engaging situations and conversations even alienated individuals encounter as they wend their hapless way through their often bewildering lives.

• Heller McAlpin is a freelance writer in New York.

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