A Dark Food Fairytale

sleeping woman, Photograph by la-la-laine.

Haruki Murakami’s new novel, After Dark, is an existential twist on the story of Sleeping Beauty. Mari sits in a diner near the magic hour of midnight, reading, while her beautiful sister Eri sleeps a deep fairytale temporary-suspension-of-life kind of sleep. Mari is drawn into a strange, violent underworld by a jazz musician, who once dreamed of being the sleeping sister’s handsome prince. He sits with the studious younger sister and orders chicken salad and toast. Television screens and mobile phones carry warnings of doom. This is an urban version of the Grimm’s midnight forest.

“You don’t like chicken?” he asks.

“It’s not that,” Mari says. “But I make a point of not eating chicken out.”

“Why not?”

“Especially the chicken they serve in chain restaurants — they’re full of weird drugs. Growth hormones and stuff. The chickens are locked in these dark, narrow cages, and given all these shots, and their feed is full of chemicals, and they’re put on conveyor belts, and machines cut their heads off and pluck them…”

“Whoa!” he says with a smile. “Chicken salad a la George Orwell!”