After Dark - by Haruki Murakami

Replace those two chatting adults seen above with a couple of scruffy college kids, and I think you've got the setting for this story by a thoroughly Japanese author immersed in American pop culture.

Beginning with Erich Segal's "Love Story", for which this is a variation that focuses on the moments when two lonely souls find each other, rather than on whatever consequences may follow.

Because this is a story that only covers precisely 6 hours and 56 minutes in the wee hours of a single night.

And that kind of precision is felt everywhere in this story - that feels more like a screenplay than a novel. (just like the Segal book)

Immersed in a high-tech, impersonal world, and surrounded by a variety of people who have failed, our two young protagonists can look forward to productive lives of personal fulfillment -- despite their rocky backgrounds -- due to their honesty, kindness, and persistence.

And their conventionality - as the young man is about to ditch his interest in music to study law, and the young woman is mastering a foreign language -- not just any foreign language -- but Chinese, which is the foundation of Japanese high culture, as well as the booming economic giant of this decade.


(BTW -- the Segal book even gets mentioned in this narrative - though the characters seem to have forgotten its tragic ending)


(BTW II - the relationship between Japan and China is further explored by introducing us to a Chinese prostitute who is beaten and robbed by a rather heartless Japanese techie/aesthete. But to make it a bit more complicated -- the Chinese pimp is even crueler - and as another character says, Chinese gangsters make their Japanese colleagues look like saints)

The story is framed by a bird's view of the city as a kind of gigantic creature, with it's human inhabitants as functioning parts of an organic whole -- a notion which seems distinctly Japanese - and would not fit the Chinese or Indian fiction I've been reading.