Well, I should say 'narrators': the narrative voice is a mysterious first-person plural. When Eri is trapped on the other side of the TV screen, she is described thus: 'Her pupils have taken on a lonely hue, like gray clouds reflected in a calm lake.' Beautiful as the image is, there is an existential dread inherent in it, amplified by the fact that the languorous narrator has taken such poetic care over his words while looking on, right there in her bedroom. Indeed, it is altogether too cool for comfort. Such fatalism is made only more resonant by the novel's matter-of-fact style.

No one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out.' Such places open secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light. The strangeness of the novel's action, it is suggested at one point, is due to it happening in 'a place resembling a deep, inaccessible fissure. But holes need not be physical ones in the ground.

' We know from Murakami's previous fiction that people sometimes go down wells. One of the love-hotel assistants talks of her troubled life: 'The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. There are holes, and you can fall down them. Beyond the mirror, as beyond the TV screen, there appears to be another realm. Except that the second time, the mirror image does something that the person hadn't done. Twice, light itself seems to slow down, becoming sluggish and viscous, as people leave their likenesses in mirrors, the reflections still peering out when their owners have left the room. Instead the novel progresses through hallucinatory edits. There are few explanatory connections and reasons for acts. There is also the man who beat up the prostitute, in his office late at night, talking to his wife on the phone or doing sit-ups on a yoga mat with Scarlatti on the CD player. Mari, the serious, still centre of the novel, chats about battery farming or cinema or her beautiful sister's modelling career. Later, Eri will be sucked through the screen and trapped in that room.Īs usual in Murakami, the uncanny is juxtaposed with exquisite ordinariness.

An unplugged television set sparks to life, showing a room where a man sits wearing a cellophane mask. Meanwhile, Mari's sister Eri is asleep, as she has been for the last two months, and something very strange is happening in her bedroom. Before dawn she will have met a trombonist, Takahashi, as well as Kaoru, the tough blond manager of a local love hotel, where a Chinese prostitute is beaten up by a mysterious man. Just before midnight, we meet a young woman, Mari, smoking and reading a book in a coffee shop.

Haruki murakami night