POST-MODERN LIFE

The world today is closer than ever, so they say. With jet planes to quickly move us to different points on the globe, to the Internet, which connects us to anyone on the map with a click of a button, the world has certainly gotten smaller. These technological advancements were created to make our lives easier and more comfortable so that we can do things that we want to do. Yet, it seems as if it is these things that make our lives infinitely more difficult. Instead of being the masters of these technologies, we become their slaves. Let us take the Internet, for example. With the Internets wide range of topics and its ease of access, one can easily be overwhelmed with informationinformation overloadsomething previous generations could not even imagine. Its engulfing of our sensibilities is so quick that Internet addiction is now an accepted type of addiction, in line with drug and alcohol-related addictions. With these technologies in place, society has been dominated by urbanization, commercialization and pop culture/mass media which, for the span of this essay, I would like to call the dominant figures. But are we even aware that our lives have been dominated by these entities? This is what After Dark, by Haruki Murakami, is all about. It is a commentary on the effects of urbanization, commercialization, consumerism and technological advancement to our daily lives. The novel is a parallel to our lives. To prove my point, I would like to present my methodology. I would be reading the novel using a Formalist Criticism while applying the literary theory of postmodernism. This would mean that I would be analysing the literary elements of the novel and look at how the ideas of postmodernism is applied. Now, on to the analysis.

After Dark is a novel set in urban Japan, amidst a wave of modernization and globalization. Here we meet characters who are living in the night, in places that are clearly the products of the dominant figures. Our lives, just like the characters, are formed by and around the dominant figures. In the book first few pages of the book, we are introduced to the dominant figures present. a sea of neon colours. They call this place an "amusement district."A large game centre crammed with young people; wild electronic sounds; a group of college students spilling out from a bar; the karaoke club pitchmen keep shouting for customers This excerpt shows us these dominant figures and how, in the darkness of the night, they continue to operate. In the succeeding pages, a character, Mari Asai, who is inside a Dennys Restaurant, is introduced. For those who are not familiar with Dennys, it is a restaurant which is always open24/7, so to speak. Even in the description of Mari, and the setting which she is presently inhabiting, the dominant forces manifest themselves. First off, the restaurant was described as floor plan designed to the last detail by management engineers; staff meticulously trained to deal with customers by the book Everything about the restaurant is anonymous and interchangeable. With this description, we see that Dennys was trying to keep the costs down by not investing too much on the furniture and the like. Instead, the invested in maximizing the space to be able to accommodate more customers and maximize their profit. This is, no doubt, a show of the consumerist mindset. This also shows another concept in the postmodern theory, the death of the subject. I would expound on this later. Next, there is the Boston Red Sox cap. One would first think of Mari being a Red Sox fan, since she has team merchandise. But in Chapter 13, she would tell us otherwise, in a conversation with Takahashi. Why are you wearing a Red Sox cap? Takahashi asks. Somebody gave it to me, she says. You're not a Red Sox fan? I don't know a thing about baseball.

In this excerpt of their conversation, we are shown how much of a consumerist society there is nowadays. A few lines up from this excerpt, another evidence of this consumerist society is evidenced. Advertising circulars have been stuffed under the windscreen wipers of cars parked along the street. Moving on from Dennys, another entity which shows the might of the commercial life is the Alphaville Love Hotel. Here, in the so-called love hotel, couples rent rooms per hour. With such a rate, we can only imagine what things can also happen. In the case of the story, it is a prostitution den. Men bring in their prostitutes and begin whatever they have talked about. But, this time around, a man, who we will, later on meet as Seikichi, beat up a Chinese prostitute by the name of Guo Dongli. And in the midst of the clean-up of the aftermath of this unfortunate event, the manager, Kaoru, was still able to say: Sorry, but we need this room for the next customer. This shows the extent of people being money-driven. Even more than that, there is the issue of prostitution. Using the human body for profit! This is, what I would call, dehumanization. I would expound later on how the modern world creates this dehumanizing effect on our lives, as shown in the novel. Since we have touched upon Seikichi, I would like to show how the dominant factors had formed the way he lives. Seikichi was shown to be an employee of a technology company, Veritech. He is described as he can handle all difficulties logically, analytically. Aside from this seemingly robotic way with which he manages everything, his conversations with his wife shows a certain level of coldness, a space between them that he has set there. This gap between them is highly evident in the way the wife describes their current situation. Here we go again: never meeting (i)t may be my imagination, but I seem to recall you saying the exact same words a month agoHis wife sighs. "I hope it works out this time. I'd like to have a meal together once in a while, and maybe go to sleep at the same time.

To which, his only reply was Yeah. For the entirety of their conversation, you can feel he was not too interested in getting home early after work. It seems as if he really did want to create a space between them. And this is only possible because of technology. He could make excuses over the phone, his wife never seeing his facial expression. He would be making excuses about his work, as he is some sort of software engineer or somewhere along those line, and his wife would have no questions. Again, technology made it possible for him to make the space between them. Now, I would like to show how the effects of the dominant forces affect one of the more enigmatic characters: Eri Asai. Eri Asai, as described by her sister, was a model for girls magazine. This means that at an early age Eri was already exposed to pop culture, mass media and the consumer society. That is three out of the four entities that I have dubbed as the dominant forces. One can only imagine how that would affect a young child if it had greatly negative effect on grown man, like Seikichi. But we need not imagine one of these effects as Mari has already told us what it is. it seems, we grew further and further apart. We separated, and before long we were living in different worlds. Eri, as aforementioned, is a model. She has modelled for girls magazines, in commercials, in TV shows. She started to be eaten by her world. And in being consumed by the world she inhabits, her relationship with Mari soured. They grew ever apart. Technology, and everything it brings, created disjoint relationship. Another example of this would be Seikichi with his wife. I have already mentioned about Seikichis excuses and how he uses technology to his advantage in hiding a double life from his wife. Technology became the barrier. By using this barrier, he is not being fully honest in a marriage where trust is the most important aspect. In doing so, we expose another effect of technology.

Our humanity is reduced. In the postmodern theory, the subjectivity of human person is lost. We are dispensable beings which, if we err, can be replaced. This is evident in, as I have mentioned before, the description of Dennys. staff meticulously trained to deal with customers by the book: Welcome to Denny's. Everything about the restaurant is anonymous and interchangeable. Aside from this, there are characters who show how society, nowadays, do not value the human person. Two characters, Seikichi and Korogi, are being hunted down. Seikichi is oblivious of this, but the threat exists. As for Korogi, she has implies this in her conversation with Mari. Im running away fromcertain people. But the character that exhibits this most is Guo Dongli. She is an object, a sex object. She was not looked at by Seikichi as a person but as something for sexual desires. He looked at her, simply, as a way of stimulating himself. Stimulation is something that always happens. But in our world, there is too much stimulation. The dominant forces uses different stimuli to affect us. This is why they have such a strong hold on us. This overstimulation is shown by the fact that the characters in the story were awake in the late evening and early morning. The novel, after all, is set in the late evening. And in this late evening scene, we see characters whose work cannot be finished in the daytime. They want to be awake, because they need to be. Even in the real world, sleep has been a luxury. We always want to be awake because there is a plethora of things to do and information to digest. The traditional waking hours are not enough. This, again, is brought about by the dominant forces. And while staying awake, the dominant forces, more specifically the commercial sector of postmodern society, benefit from this as we stay in places they keep open all day everyday. To show this, I would like to mention Mari. Mari was said to be at Dennys, alone, in the late night. She was reading a rather thick book. We cannot conclude what she was reading about, but we can infer that she is reading

something school related. It is nearing autumn, after all, and she is an incoming college freshman, to boot. Aside from Mari, Takahashi is also awake at the late hours in which our novel is set. He is having band practice. He mentions in his conversation with Mari that he is a pre-law student for quite some time but is not serious about his studies, since he is thinking more of the band than anything. This confusion of sorts can be attributed, again, to the dominant forces, and in this situation, mass media\pop culture are to be blamed. The TV and movies show images of an easy life when one gets to adulthood. Barely any movies show that in order for one to survive, one has to work. It is always the parents that work. No young adult is seen to be working. Instead, they are being shown as chasing their dreams, however unrealistic. I think that this has already embedded itself in the postmodern teens subconscious. We are living a life that is dictated on us by society. The way we move, the way we speak, the way we choose and every other detail in our lives are dictated to us by the dominant forces. After all, why would Alphaville, 7-eleven still be open at the wee hours of the morning, in our novel? Why else would taxis be going around the city at such a late hour? Because these are businesses. They cater to our need, needs that they themselves have created. Again, this is because of the fact that they want us to go to them and be dependent upon them. Now, by having our lives depend upon them, it changes us. The different stimuli that they have used upon us have changed us. They affect our daily lives and have defined, for us, who we are and how we live and relate. To show this, I would like to present some characters and what stimuli affect them and how it has changed them. First off is Mari. She is an incoming college freshman. Since she is a student, she is affected by the demands of being a student. In being a student, the use of new technology is

inevitable. In doing so, she is exposed to an inordinate amount of information, many of which she does not need, but nevertheless, consumes. Next is Eri. She is described as a model from an early age. As I have already mentioned before, her early exposure to pop culture and mass media affected Eri. It has affected Eri so much that she is trapped in that world, which is figuratively shown in her being trapped inside the TV set. Also, you see how this exposure led to her and Maris distancing from each other. They lived completely different lives. Then, we have Takahashi. A pre-law student and band member, he is greatly affected by mass media and pop culture due to his exposure to them. He even mentions a movie that has, in some ways, an effect on him. But even during his viewing of the film, the distractions of his daily life is shown. He was not able to watch with full attention. I can't remember. I had stuff to do, so I didn't watch the last part very closely With all these things, the world being controlled by the dominant forces, shown in the novel, how is it, then, a commentary? The novel wants to make us aware of the empty feeling inside of us. This emptiness stems from all the stimulation that we encounter yet has no meaning. In the postmodern theory, this is called the simulacra. Everything is taken at face value. Eri is a prime example of this. Her physical beauty was exploited by pop culture and media. Everything was about smiles and beauty. Her so-called accomplishments were really just an illusion of accomplishment. There is no depth in what she does. Maybe that is why she just wanted to sleep. She is bothered. We cannot really be certain about this since we know nothing of the thoughts inside Eris mind. But we can infer that she must be running away from something. This is a thought shared by Korogi. ... [She] must have some big problem she's trying to deal with, something she can't solve on her own. So all she wants to do is go to bed and sleep, to get away from the flesh-and-blood world for a while.

But we can see that Eri was not like this before being consumed by pop culture. She was a loving sister to Mari which was evidenced by her hugging of her younger sister in an incident inside an elevator. Mari felt the emotion run between them. She squeezed me so hard our two bodies felt as if they were melting into oneThe two of us became one: there were no gaps between us. We even shared a single heartbeat. And in that moment, the novel wants us to feel again. We have been too caught up in the whirlwind brought about by the dominant forces that the novel wanted to make us stop and be aware of us and our emotions. In the novel itself, this pause is shown. Mari was reflecting on her and her sisters relationship. She opened up to Korogi about her status with her sister. I never knew my sister very welllike, how she was spending her days, or what she was thinking about, or who she was seeing. I don't even know if something was troubling her. I know this sounds cold, but even though we were living in the same house, she was busy with her stuff and I was busy with my stuff, and the two of us never really talked heart-to-heart. It's not that we didn't get along: we never had a fight after we grew up. It's just that we've been living very different lives for a long time. You can sense the repressed emotions inside Mari. In another conversation, this time with Takahashi, she shows further how she felt towards her sister, after narrating the elevator incident mentioned before. But that was the last time. That washow should I say it?the one moment in my life when I was able to draw closest to Erithe one moment when she and I joined heart to heart as one: there was nothing separating us. After that, it seems, we grew further and further apart. That sense of union I felt in the darkness of the lift, that strong bond between our hearts, never came back again. I don't know what went wrong, but we were never able to go back to where we started from. And the greatest show of pausing our lives and sharing ourselves, Mari goes back to the Asai home and just goes to bed with her sister, in the hopes of rekindling the closeness that she felt years back. She gently presses her cheek against her sister's chest and holds herself there, listening, hoping to understand each beat of her sister's hear. Consciousness just happens to be missing from it at the moment: it may have gone into hiding, but Mari can hear its faint reverberationsEri's flow is almost certainly blending with my own, Mari feels. We are

sisters, after all she curls up to sleep beside her big sisterto bond with her if possible, to share the warmth of their two bodies, to exchange signs of life with her. Being a metafictive work, it makes us stop and make us aware, literally, of ourselves. The breaks that is put in the chapters on Eri makes us conscious that we are readers. It forces us to go back to reality and think of the blurred lines in our world and in the work itself. It is the emotions within us that the novel wants us to show, despite the fast-paced, highly logical and methodological world we inhabit. In the novel, these changes are shown. It is not only for us to be able to see a change in the characters but also for us to ponder upon. Mari was originally cold towards Takahashi but, at the latter part of the story, you feel that Mari is starting to open up to and Takahashi and be a bit warmer in her conversations with him. But the greatest show of this is in the excerpts on how Mari had wanted to get close with her sister again. At the beginning, her way of talking about her sister had a matter-of-fact feel. But as the novel wore on, it changed. This change is what Murakami wants us to have. By showing us the novel in the eyes of a camera, it causes a break that makes us reflect. It becomes a new experience for us to feel, not just read and imagine. This fresh feeling is because of the defamiliarization brought about by his way of writing the novel. And by defamiliarizing us from our everyday life, we see things in a different light. The novel becomes an eye-opener to the realities of our lives.