chicken salad of my sleepless nights

I only read Haruki Murakami between the hours of two and five in the mornings.
before any fortunate sleepers think this connotes disrespect to the wordy Japanese jazzman, I would hasten to mention that the insomnolent don't always read to induce sleep. sometimes it's a deliberate search for literary weapons with which to battle those wakeful demons.

nobody can illuminate the temporal discord experienced by the insomniac quite like Murakami. his cities, like all cities, never stop. but they change in the shadows between the last train and the first morning service, becoming surreal versions of their lighted forms. nor does his time stop; but the count can creep slowly and inexorably like treacle, dragging the past through the present like a thing stuck in the flow.

I am reading his newest fiction, After Dark. Murakami describes the city in a nocturnal lull as still alive, but on basal metabolic function. from the couch I hear my own city making the sounds of basic continuous motions. sparse, benevolent motors freed from daytime urgency. the buried humming of the elevators and their insistent arrival bells. more importunate are the garbage trucks. an easily neglected fact about cities, this one at least, is that for the sake of traffic and pedestrians the garbage can only be removed between 11pm and 5am. people ask me if I like living in the middle of the city.
"Love it, but for the garbage trucks".
"Oh yes", they agree, "we get woken up by ours on Wednesday mornings too".
but mine are different. they are nightly, numerous and frequent, each taking a different category of waste from the subterranean loading dock below my window. they beep, seemingly with intent to disturb, as they begin their long, tight reverse into the hidden darkness of the dock. once the truck is in place a hydraulic whine begins; lifting, compacting, grinding. this is loud, the straining engine part. when it ends twenty minutes later the regular hum of the truck's engine seems unobtrusive by comparison. the air brakes screech on release and the truck grunts as it climbs out of the dock and on to another load up the street. on a busy night there's another one waiting in the street to take its place. I have Murakami-esque images of a truck which removes only the plastic fish shaped soy sauce dispensers which the take-away city sushi-munchers generate daily by the thousands. he would thoughtfully problematise the categorisation of the little red or green plastic caps for the fish shaped bottles, I'm sure.

Murakami's descriptive style almost avoids sensorily provoking the reader, as if out of tact or modesty, while evoking the scene in a more prosaic manner. at times the scenes in After Dark turn us from reader to viewer as he tells us what he and we are seeing on the screen or through the lens, taking away scent, taste and sometimes confounding our clear view with blurred images and static. but he doesn't restrain his use of sensual language for aural pleasures. once the owner of a jazz club in Tokyo (in the 70s, when jazz was not Big In Japan), Murakami's passion for Ellington et. al. is irrepressible. the sounds of those musicians are scratched out by needles in various rooms, for Murakami is a vinyl lover. he elucidates a soul-search for the true meaning of music through the young trombone player, Takahashi, who answers Mari's question about what it really means to play:
"Hmm, let's see... You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of physical shift, and simultaneously the listener's body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It's giving birth to that kind of shared state. Probably."

in Murakami's style of casually revealing the profound and extaordinary to the reader in the most prosaic of scenes, this conversation takes place at 3:07am in a Denny's restaurant. Takahashi orders a chicken salad with crispy bread, because he always orders the chicken salad at Denny's, even though he pretends to peruse the menu anyway, just so it's not apparent that he always orders chicken salad with crispy bread (which is never as crispy as he requests, despite Japanese technological proficiency, he muses). the implied repetition of the chicken salad reminds me of the more obvious temporal indicator in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in which the narrator is always cooking spaghetti when he receives mysterious phone calls, and informs the caller that she only has nine minutes left to talk because the packet indicates the cooking time is ten minutes. when I read that book I pictured Mr. Wind-Up Bird swirling the boiling spaghetti with his cooking chopsticks, and wondered what kind of sauce he added.

now After Dark sees me awake at 4:57am wondering what a Tokyo Denny's chicken salad is like.