After Dark

by Haruki Murakami

She reaches out at regular intervals and brings the coffee cup to her mouth, but she doesn’t appear to be enjoying the flavour. She drinks because she has a cup of coffee in front of her: that is her role as a customer.

There are more single customers to be seen now: someone writing on a laptop, someone text-messaging on a cellphone, another absorbed in reading like Mari, another doing nothing but staring thoughtfully out of the window. Maybe they can’t sleep. Maybe they don’t want to sleep. A family restaurant provides such people with a place to park themselves late at night.

“It’s true, though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,” the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette. “You can’t fight it.”

Her emotional state communicates itself through the glass.

A new silence comes to overlay the silence that is already there.

All information gives way to nothingness, all sense of place is withdrawn, all meaning is dismantled, and the two worlds are divided, leaving behind a silence lacking all sensation.

“That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

Vivid streaks of light stream into the room through gaps in the blind.