Harvill Secker £14.99 pp201

“Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,” comments a character in After Dark. Haruki Murakami’s new novel is a dense exploration of time and place, identity and possibility. Clocks tick and digital numbers flash as night creeps steadily towards dawn, but time also stands still, bends, flexes and turns backwards as alternative worlds slide in and out of focus to form a kind of alternative present.

Nineteen-year-old Mari has grown up in the shadow of her big sister Eri. The novel takes place in the witching hours from midnight to dawn. Occasionally, we are invited to visit Eri, the “sleeping beauty”, in her bed. We gaze at her like a camera – from above, sideways and the other side of a television screen. Mari, meanwhile, is more three dimensional: lodged in an allnight cafe with a thick book, cups of tea and tuna sandwiches, she resists sleep, determined not to go home to her somnolent sibling.

As night progresses, Mari meets a jazz trombonist, visits a “Love Ho” (a hotel that hires out rooms to lovers), encounters other lost souls, talks about memory, siblings, escape and time and finally ends up back home, curled around her sleeping sister. Throughout, individuals behave as if trapped in bubbles, knocking against each other, sometimes gently, sometimes with violence, but never so that they burst. This perhaps sounds dark and depressing but it is not. Murakami’s gift is that his bizarre and disconnected universe makes intuitive sense; his playful touch and deep compassion for the isolated human state lend his words a joyful, colourful tint. This is a complex work by a thinker who, like his characters, defies definition.

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