Not to quibble endlessly, but you do allow me to clarify why this particular character reminds me of a Houellebecqian character. I am not so sure this character is “contented” with jazz and beer, although he is doing something that contents other characters in the Murakami oeuvre; and I’m not sure that he actually “cleaves” to these fragments of culture. And for both reasons, I was reminded of Houellebecq’s characters, who have specific cultural appetites (monoprix meals, wines, music) but neither relish them nor cleave to them. They exist together, by habit, by some convention, by some accidents of fate, because you have to have something, because others do it. These cultural moments have no more weight, no more density, than the acts of violence or sexuality interspersed between them.

It’s interesting that the prostitute-beater put you in mind of him in the first place. The figure of a man ascetically peforming yoga to Scarlatti sonatas is, as you say, sort-of-existential, but his answer to whatever he perceives the existential problem to be - ie, to cleave nonetheless to whatever fragments of culture are available - seems quite different from what happens in Houellebecq.

I had the perhaps more troubling thought that this man was a demonic mirror-image of your standard Murakami narrator - slightly disconnected socially, contenting himself with jazz and beer etc - and hence perhaps, deliberately, of Murakami himself.

There were two aspects of After Dark that made me think of Houellebecq when I was reading it.

Obviously, we have the man who beat up the prostitute: an aseptic character, coolly unable to connect the pain in his hand to someone else’s pain. He is an automaton of sorts, unconnected to other people, his family, his co-workers, organising his life around the classical music on the radio, a few meals he does not relish, and his sit-ups. He seemed to have stepped out of and away from Camus by way of Houellebecq (whose Platform begins as a frank re-write of the intro to L’Etranger).

Even more Houellebecqian, After Dark is a peculiar science fiction. As you point out, there is a warping of physics and technology and as you put it tremendously, the “subtle dislocation of the narrative we” - that “alien” and “strange” difference exacted from an uncomfortable “we”, something that Houellebecq aims for in Atomised. But in both Atomised and After Dark, one can contentedly read the book for quite some time, picking up on the oddness but not quite placing it, until you come towards the end and you realise that the narrator is much less trustworthy and much more freaky than you had imagined, and whatever concepts you had of who “we” are changes. Murakami doesn’t slap this on like a punchline, but achieves a much more unsettling effect.

Tonally, Murakami has a much lighter touch, as when the characters try to explain themselves and make sense of what they’re doing. Houellebecq never quite accomplishes “exquisite ordinariness” but I feel that he wants to juxtapose something like “exquisite ordinariness” not to the uncanny but to the obscene (which are not entirely unrelated concepts).

So, why is this the book that Houellebecq has been trying to write? Murakami handles the effects of dissociation from morality and from other people in a way that Houellebecq does not - Murakami uses silk gloves and a gentle push where Houellebecq uses a mallet and a giant dildo.