Haruki Murakami, After Dark (translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin)
Harvill Secker; PB $29.95; HB $52.95; 191pp
Haruki Murakami’s novels have always had a dreamlike quality, and After Dark is no exception. In fact, it is exemplary. For one thing, the action takes place at night, which allows the novelist plenty of scope for his viscid, drowsy, noirish surrealism. Vladimir Nabokov divided people into those who sleep well and those who sleep badly. Murakami, I’m willing to bet, sleeps badly. Certainly, he gives the distinct impression of never being entirely awake. A literary insomniac or somnambulist, he writes, as it were, from the back of the mind, where an uncanny reality blinks and flickers.
After Dark is set in Tokyo and begins with a chance meeting in an American-style diner between a bookish nineteen year-old, Mari Asai, and a jazz musician, Tetsuya Takahashi. Mari speaks Chinese and Takahashi is known at the local ‘love hotel’. Thus, when a Chinese prostitute is beaten up by one of her clients, Mari agrees to translate for her. This brings her into contact with Kaoru, the hotel manager and an ex-female wrestler, who successfully identifies the prostitute’s attacker as a local company man, Shirakawa. She gives his photograph to the prostitute’s pimp and we settle back to await the denouement, less in suspense as to what will happen, than in anticipation of what it may mean.
Like Murakami’s previous novels, After Dark is full of references to Western (largely American) literature, cinema, music, brand names and food. (No one in Murakami’s novels ever sits down to a Japanese meal and few ever listen to Japanese music. His most famous novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, opens with the central character cooking spaghetti and listening to Rossini.) Nevertheless, Japan is his subject, and Japanese anomie (as opposed to anime) pervades this short and elusive novel. Mari’s older sister, Eri Asai, spends most of her life asleep in her bedroom and her self-confinement is symbolically linked, via some Murakami magic, to the corporate culture of modern Japan, with its frenetic pressure and male-dominated ethos.
Murakami’s prose is always low-cal but in the past he has tended to throw his readers one or two morsels of juicy description to keep the hunger pangs at bay. (Take, for example, this Chandleresque nugget from A Wild Sheep Chase (1982): ‘I was about to speak when the maître d’hôtel advanced on our table. He showed me the wine label, all smiles as if showing me a photo of his only son.’) In After Dark, there are no such titbits. The narration is in the present tense, and while it records, it does not reflect. In fact, our ‘point of view’ is likened explicitly (and not infrequently) to a camera, the various angles and pannings of which are the subject of much authorial interest. Whether they have any readerly interest – this is an entirely different matter. Here is a fairly typical passage:
We look down at her [Eri] from above as she lies in bed. Gradually, as point of view, we begin to draw back. We break through the ceiling, moving steadily up and away from her. The higher we climb, the smaller grows our image of Eri Asai, until it is just a single point, and then it is gone. We increase our speed, moving backward through the stratosphere. The earth shrinks until it, too, finally disappears. Our point of view draws back through the vacuum of nothingness.
This reads more like a screenplay than a novel, as indeed does the book as a whole (such that the many references to brand names begin to look like product placements). Precisely what distinguishes it as literature – as a literary work of art – is unclear.
To attain to the status of literature, a novel needs to accomplish something that can’t be accomplished in another medium. On this level, at least, After Dark is a failure. Short on description and long on direction, it might have made an engaging film, but as a novel it doesn’t cut the wasabi.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Friday, June 08, 2007
What Grates About America (The Weekend Australian)
Dinesh D’Souza, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11
Doubleday; $55.95; 333pp
You wouldn’t think, to look at him, that Dinesh D’Souza was a fierce right-winger, a social conservative in the mould of Ann Coulter (author of Godless: The Church of Liberalism and America’s loudest theocon). With his ageless face and wistful expression, he looks like he wouldn’t hurt a fly and couldn’t hurt a fly even if he wanted to. In reality, however, his determination to torment ‘blue America’ borders on the fanatical – an important reminder to literary audiences never to judge a book by its cover.
Having said that, the cover of The Enemy at Home, which depicts a befouled American flag and a page of ominously smouldering parchment, is a fairly good, if oblique, indication of the often-sinister bluster within it. Nor should the reader imagine that its title (proudly embossed in Republican red) is merely a cynical attempt to boost sales. In D’Souza’s eyes, the ‘cultural left’ really is responsible for 9/11 and the ‘spoiled children of the 1960s’ are a genuine fifth column in the war on terror.
D’Souza was born in Mumbai, India, in 1961 and immigrated to the US in 1979. Since then, he has built a lucrative career out of blaming the American left for everything from the decline of educational standards (Illiberal Education, 1991) to Afro-American underachievement (The End of Racism, 1995). His last book, What’s So Great About America (2002), was a response to the 9/11 attacks in which he took on America’s critics both from within and without the Republic. The Enemy at Home picks up that theme, with an emphasis very much on the former.
According to D’Souza, the cultural left is the ‘primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting in the Islamic world’. The reasons for this, he suggests, are twofold. First, it has ‘routinely affirmed the most vicious prejudices about American foreign policy’ and in doing so has led extremist factions within Islam to attack the US. Second, it has fostered a decadent culture, the pornographic nature of which has so disgusted traditional Muslims that it has allowed extremist Islam to flourish.
The first of these points is the saner one, though D’Souza, in the first of many non sequiturs, wilfully confuses a phenomenon with a cause. Moreover, the phenomenon (the left’s ‘anti-imperialism’) has been dealt with far more intelligently by liberal writers such as Paul Berman and Nick Cohen. Not that it hurts to be reminded of the assorted stupidities of the pseudo-left. Whether we need a McCarthyesque list of ‘domestic insurgents’ is another matter, but D’Souza provides one, just in case.
Proceeding to the second point, we find D’Souza squarely in his element, or rather ostentatiously out of it. Pressing the pomaded handkerchief of ‘traditional morality’ to his nose and lips, he walks us through the degeneracy and debauchery – the ‘pagan depravity’ – of contemporary culture, a garden of obscenities for which, it seems, the cultural left is exclusively responsible. Abortion, prostitution, drugs, pornography, Jerry Springer, Madonna – each item of filth is carefully sealed in its plastic bag and stored as evidence. Gay marriage excites a special animus, intensified (it is painfully clear) by a distaste for homosexuality per se. (He criticises the comedian Ellen DeGeneres for coming out as a lesbian but was editor-in-chief at the Dartmouth Review when it shamefully outed two gay students.)
From this diagnosis of liberal culture emerges a prescription for the American right, which D’Souza lays out in the following terms. By setting itself against the left and the sordid culture it has lovingly fostered, the right can convince traditional Muslims that it shares their fundamental values. Since ‘the real divide in the Muslim world is between Islamic radicals and traditional Muslims’, the right, by allying itself with the latter, can marginalise and eventually defeat the former. It can thereby win the ‘culture war’ and the war on terror in a single push. (This is what Americans call a ‘twofer’.)
To whom, then, is this book addressed? Not to the ‘cultural left’, but to the right, and the religious right in particular. Consequently, I find it hard to comment on whether it’s worth the asking price. Suffice it to say: if the thought of an alliance of Mayflower screwballs and boring, bearded theocrats doesn’t make you recoil in horror; if you believe that female emancipation, human rights and freedom of speech should take a back seat to (‘traditional’) morality; or else you’re simply a curtain-twitcher and a capital letter moralist who thinks that what America needs is more families like the Waltons and fewer families like the Simpsons, then this feeble-minded little book is for you. What’s more, I’m delighted to have you as an enemy, at home and abroad, and in perpetuity.
Doubleday; $55.95; 333pp
You wouldn’t think, to look at him, that Dinesh D’Souza was a fierce right-winger, a social conservative in the mould of Ann Coulter (author of Godless: The Church of Liberalism and America’s loudest theocon). With his ageless face and wistful expression, he looks like he wouldn’t hurt a fly and couldn’t hurt a fly even if he wanted to. In reality, however, his determination to torment ‘blue America’ borders on the fanatical – an important reminder to literary audiences never to judge a book by its cover.
Having said that, the cover of The Enemy at Home, which depicts a befouled American flag and a page of ominously smouldering parchment, is a fairly good, if oblique, indication of the often-sinister bluster within it. Nor should the reader imagine that its title (proudly embossed in Republican red) is merely a cynical attempt to boost sales. In D’Souza’s eyes, the ‘cultural left’ really is responsible for 9/11 and the ‘spoiled children of the 1960s’ are a genuine fifth column in the war on terror.
D’Souza was born in Mumbai, India, in 1961 and immigrated to the US in 1979. Since then, he has built a lucrative career out of blaming the American left for everything from the decline of educational standards (Illiberal Education, 1991) to Afro-American underachievement (The End of Racism, 1995). His last book, What’s So Great About America (2002), was a response to the 9/11 attacks in which he took on America’s critics both from within and without the Republic. The Enemy at Home picks up that theme, with an emphasis very much on the former.
According to D’Souza, the cultural left is the ‘primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting in the Islamic world’. The reasons for this, he suggests, are twofold. First, it has ‘routinely affirmed the most vicious prejudices about American foreign policy’ and in doing so has led extremist factions within Islam to attack the US. Second, it has fostered a decadent culture, the pornographic nature of which has so disgusted traditional Muslims that it has allowed extremist Islam to flourish.
The first of these points is the saner one, though D’Souza, in the first of many non sequiturs, wilfully confuses a phenomenon with a cause. Moreover, the phenomenon (the left’s ‘anti-imperialism’) has been dealt with far more intelligently by liberal writers such as Paul Berman and Nick Cohen. Not that it hurts to be reminded of the assorted stupidities of the pseudo-left. Whether we need a McCarthyesque list of ‘domestic insurgents’ is another matter, but D’Souza provides one, just in case.
Proceeding to the second point, we find D’Souza squarely in his element, or rather ostentatiously out of it. Pressing the pomaded handkerchief of ‘traditional morality’ to his nose and lips, he walks us through the degeneracy and debauchery – the ‘pagan depravity’ – of contemporary culture, a garden of obscenities for which, it seems, the cultural left is exclusively responsible. Abortion, prostitution, drugs, pornography, Jerry Springer, Madonna – each item of filth is carefully sealed in its plastic bag and stored as evidence. Gay marriage excites a special animus, intensified (it is painfully clear) by a distaste for homosexuality per se. (He criticises the comedian Ellen DeGeneres for coming out as a lesbian but was editor-in-chief at the Dartmouth Review when it shamefully outed two gay students.)
From this diagnosis of liberal culture emerges a prescription for the American right, which D’Souza lays out in the following terms. By setting itself against the left and the sordid culture it has lovingly fostered, the right can convince traditional Muslims that it shares their fundamental values. Since ‘the real divide in the Muslim world is between Islamic radicals and traditional Muslims’, the right, by allying itself with the latter, can marginalise and eventually defeat the former. It can thereby win the ‘culture war’ and the war on terror in a single push. (This is what Americans call a ‘twofer’.)
To whom, then, is this book addressed? Not to the ‘cultural left’, but to the right, and the religious right in particular. Consequently, I find it hard to comment on whether it’s worth the asking price. Suffice it to say: if the thought of an alliance of Mayflower screwballs and boring, bearded theocrats doesn’t make you recoil in horror; if you believe that female emancipation, human rights and freedom of speech should take a back seat to (‘traditional’) morality; or else you’re simply a curtain-twitcher and a capital letter moralist who thinks that what America needs is more families like the Waltons and fewer families like the Simpsons, then this feeble-minded little book is for you. What’s more, I’m delighted to have you as an enemy, at home and abroad, and in perpetuity.
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