After Dark

by Haruki Murakami

Realistic events and unreal events exist side by side, even overlapping with one another. These are things that can only happen in the world in the middle of the night, a world wrapped in darkness, where image transcends logic.

The music playing at low volume is “Go Away Little Girl” by Percy Faith and His Orchestra.

He is trying to remember something, and much time goes by until he gets it. He seems like the type for whom everything takes time.

The young man hums the first eight bars of “Five Spot After Dark.”

Burt Bacharach’s “The April Fools” plays through the restaurant at low volume.

“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.”

I’m sitting there listening to these trials, and all I can see in my head is this creature. It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it’s ‘the nation,’ and sometimes it’s ‘the law,’ and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It’s too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn’t give a damn that I’m me or you’re you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.”

After the trial, I took the subway home from Kasumigaseki, sat down at my desk, and started putting my notes in order when all of a sudden I got this absolutely hopeless feeling. I don’t know how to put it: it was like the whole world’s electricity supply suffered a voltage drop. Everything got one step darker, one step colder. Little tremors started going through my body, and I couldn’t stop shivering. Soon I even felt my eyes tearing up. Why should that be? I can’t explain it. Why did I have to lose it like that just because that guy got the death penalty? I mean, he was a total scumbag, beyond any hope of redemption. Between him and me, there shouldn’t have been anything in common, no link at all. And yet, I had this deep emotional upset. Why should that have been?”

“It’s my motto for life. ‘Walk slowly; drink lots of water.’”

“Let me tell you something, Mari. The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you’ve had it: things’ll never be the same. All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.”

In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.”

“You know what I think?” she says. “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed ’em to the fire, they’re all just paper.