Similar to Mari, Eri has become increasingly unreachable. Mari starts to realize in the novel that her sister even wishes that they had been closer. It is seeming that Eri has been going off the deep end. For example, Eri Asai is not as perfect as the front she puts off. Throughout After Dark, the audience comes to realize how these two sisters are not so different as they seem. So essentially Mari has always been living in the shadow of her older sister. Where Mari is very bookish, Eri is both popular and gorgeous. The strangest aspect of all is that through the entirety of After Dark Eri has been asleep for two whole months.Īt first glance, these two sisters could not be any more different. There are stark differences between the two sisters where Mari lacks confidence and suffers from modesty, her sister Eri has always been beautiful and popular. She can be seen as the main character in this novel due to her overarching conflict that appears significantly throughout the story: she and her sister are estranged.

One of the first characters introduced is a timid nineteen-year-old girl named Mari Asai. The author invites us as readers to contemplate how complex human nature truly is. Within the first few lines of After Dark, Murakami depicts the city of Tokyo as “a single gigantic creature-or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms.” The author personifies Tokyo as a working body, and these intertwining organisms are us, humans. He states that because family plays a significant role in traditional Japanese literature, any main character who is independent becomes a man who values freedom and solitude over intimacy. Most of his works use first-person narrative in the tradition of the Japanese I Novel.

After dark murakami