After Dark

Haruki Murakami illustrates us how time and society separated two sisters, making them strangers in their own house. Each took a very distant path from each other; the only thing in common was their need of each other in their respective life. Mari the youngest sister has what we would consider a normal life but in her house she was the shadow of the family. Her family made her feel ugly and not as loved as her older sister Eri. Mari had old built ups of resentment. She was living in the dark. The only way she could have gotten out of this darkness was by building a relationship with her sister Eri. Murakami describes Eri as a Hikikomori (social withdrawal). Murakami showa this to us in the scene where Eri is in her room sleeping and she woke up to see herself trapped in the TV inside her room with no outside communication. Murakami in this scene describes how Eri is feeling. Eri the magazine cover girl was idolized by everyone, watch over; however, she was lost, alone, and did not have an identity. Eri had to be what everyone else wanted her to be, she had neither privacy nor a real life. In my opinion Mari never knew how similar their lives were when seen from a different prospective.
What I like the most is that Murakami makes us part of the book, we, the readers suddenly become the narrator. We keep our distance, we watch, listen we are everywhere and we leave no trace of our existence.