J-Lit Review #8: Goodnight Tokyo
New novel channels Murakami by exploring Japan after dark but lacks substance.
Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida begins promisingly. It’s 1 am and a woman working for the prop department of a movie production company is tasked with finding loquats. She hops in a taxi and begins her search, soon stumbling on a person who tells her, “I’m a loquat thief.” Then, we meet a man with “bat syndrome” who sells strange and broken things from a secondhand store that is only open during the wee hour and before long we meet someone called the Crow Professor and another man who is supposedly a famous detective.
In short, the book begins with a tremendous amount of weirdness. These strange people and incidents are sprinkled through the early chapters in an endearing, intriguing fashion. Each chapter begins with the time, which is always 1 am and it’s all set in Tokyo, where those who work during the night are busy with various strange tasks. As the book proceeds, their lives start intersecting. The characters run into each other or find out that their pasts are entwined.
Perhaps this makes you think of Haruki Murakami’s novel, After Dark. On the surface, it’s actually quite similar. Here are just a few connections:
They are set in Tokyo and everything takes place in the wee hours.
There is a strong emphasis on intersecting lives and coincidences.
The real and unreal sometimes seem to blur.
The similarities go far beyond After Dark, though. Yes, that is the most obvious parallel but Goodnight Tokyo is more similar in certain ways to Murakami’s first two books. The odd characters and strange naming conventions bring these to mind, as well as certain interactions and even the quick but glib narrative style. There was also a humour that reminded me a lot of those early books. Perhaps the most obvious similarity is a funeral for a telephone, which will bring to mind the funeral for a switchboard from Pinball, 1973. There are many more instances where I feel the author has borrowed from Murakami, including there appearing to be two moons and characters debating whether or not this is all a dream.
Given how much I liked the start of the book and how much I love Murakami’s novels, it is perhaps surprising that I did not really enjoy this novel as much as I expected. Certainly, it began in a very intriguing way and the features the author has borrowed from Murakami are ones that I enjoy reading; however, I thought this book had a lot of promise but delivered comparatively little.
Firstly, there were too many characters and so it was hard to really get invested in any of them. Murakami’s novels typically focus on a very small number of characters with lots of extras. After Dark worked because it followed one young woman but let us see a few other characters, giving profound insights into their lives. Those that were not fully developed were intriguing because we saw enough of them to want to know more and became invested in the ones the novel looked at in the most depth. In Goodnight Tokyo, it was rather disappointing that the characters remained so vague. Yoshida seemed to fall into the trap of telling rather than showing and so the characters, despite having promise, always seemed a little wooden.
Related to that, the book moved at a rapid pace and it seemed for a while that we would be pulled quickly towards an exciting ending, but in actual fact the plot isn’t all that interesting and oftentimes the things that happen are not of much importance. Everything moves fast but nothing really happens. You feel that these people’s interconnected lives are moving towards some big revelation but there really isn’t much there. Even on a deeper level, it is lacking. Murakami’s novel was about the idea of a city as a living being—an octopus-like monster whose tentacles connect everyone—and he subtly had characters nearly but not quite meet. He very rarely makes connections obvious but at least they are there. In Goodnight Tokyo, however, it’s just a series of minor revelations.
Then the weirdness and quirkiness that hooked me right at the beginning began to seem like a cheap novelty. Murakami has great skill at utilising weirdness but it works because—no matter how hard it is to understand—there is always a reason behind his choices. His books have substance and depth but this seemed to lack both. I know it’s a harsh thing to say, but I felt that this book was almost a cynical attempt to capitalise on the attraction of quirky Japanese novels.
The dreamlike quality that was so appealing in the beginning eventually became off-putting because it was not handled well. There were elements of repetition and uncertainty of time that could really work well in a novel but then the author just has characters debating whether or not they’re in a dream and it feels lazy. As with so much, there was potential here but unfortunately it was not realised. I’m not sure whether it was poor writing, editing, or translation, but ultimately the execution of so many great ideas just fell flat.
One thing I did find interesting was the theme of Japan as an economy in decline. It was not thoroughly explored but it was an idea that kept cropping up. Several of the main characters are struggling financially because of recent changes and I felt that this was something interesting the author explored a little. Like so much else, though, it probably should have been pushed further and in this tangled, careless, rushed narrative, the point was mostly lost.
At the end, there is an afterword from the author that perhaps explains some of why this book both succeeded and failed. Yoshida calls his book “a collection of short stories that at first glance appear to be separate tales, but which are actually connected to one another, and which can in fact be better described as a collection of a full novel.” He goes on to then say “my intention could perhaps be better described as a collection of intersecting short stories.” He sounds confused about what he wanted to write.
This book did not really work as a collection of short stories, intersecting or otherwise, and to say “at first glance [they] appear to be separate tales” is not quite right. From the beginning, there were multiple stories but it was always quite obvious that they were linked. For one thing, the taxi driver character seems to join most of them and there are other threads that connect the parts of the story too. These are not exactly subtle, like the way Murakami wove the dual narratives of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I think the author has attempted something but not succeeded. It’s like another recent book, Under the Eye of the Big Bird, which carried this idea off much better. It had intelligence and subtlety that Goodnight Tokyo lacked. (I reviewed that book here.)
Overall, I liked the idea of the book more than the book itself. Certain aspects worked to a degree and I did appreciate the quirkiness. It really did remind me of early Murakami in a good way, but most of the positives wore off pretty quickly and I’m glad this was not a long book because by the halfway point I was looking forward to finishing it.
Perhaps you will enjoy this book more than me. If you want to buy it, you can find it here: