After Dark
Book by Haruki Murakami
Harvill Secker ₤14.99, 208 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤11.99

Sleep, and all the altered states its absence conjures up, are the subject of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, After Dark. Framed within the witching hours of midnight to 7am, the story roams the Tokyo of the sleepless, a netherworld of love hotels, strip-lit convenience stores, night terrors and twilight confessions. After Dark is Murakami’s first attempt to tell a tale in real time - a changing clock-face prefaces every chapter. It almost asks to be devoured by insomniacs in a single all-night sitting. Murakami’s premise is that reality realigns its contours under cover of dark, becoming at once more intimate and more estranging, and that those whom sleep forsakes live life more richly than the rest of us.

Like much recent Murakami, After Dark traces parallel lives that intersect in fleeting but transformative ways. At the core of the novel are two sisters, Eri and Mari, one of whom has slipped into a permanent, almost catatonic slumber, while the other is rendered sleepless by her sister’s troubles and wanders the darkened metropolis to escape her insomnia. We encounter Mari in an all-night diner, as she does her best to rebuff all-comers - but Tokyo at night knows better and throws a world of experience in her path. The jazz musician who claims to know her sister, the Chinese prostitute beaten savagely by a john, the ex-wrestling champ who runs a love hotel, and the cleaner with brand marks on her body who will not speak about her past: all are creatures of the night who share a sliver of themselves with Mari, and guide her towards the inevitable reckoning with the sleeping beauty who waits at home.

These moments of connection are Murakami at his best. His flair for making dialogue bloom from inhospitable soil, the way he can magic a memorable encounter out of thin air, and his conviction that there is salvation to be found in the company of strangers - all these familiar Murakami traits animate the pages of the novel and give it the writer’s special stamp. Yet in After Dark this signature style seems to have found itself a fresher groove. Certainly, the nocturnal world helps out here, and the novel’s message that the wee small hours run on their own time - inviting confidences and feeding irrational thoughts - plays straight to Murakami’s repertoire of reality-bending tricks. So it is no surprise to find a masked man lodged inside Eri’s TV set who watches her while she sleeps, and later to watch Eri herself being mysteriously transported behind the same screen.

Readers expect all this of Murakami now. But at the same time there is also the expectation that Murakami will only get ”heavy” on his fans every other novel or so. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - his meaty exploration of Japanese war crimes in Manchuria - was followed up by Sputnik Sweetheart, a pretty bagatelle of a novel that refrains from digging deep.

Initially, After Dark gives every indication of a switch back to ”lite” mode; but soon - and this is what gives the book its freshness - it becomes clear that Murakami has longer-range targets in his sights. For a start, Eri’s endless slumber is less another tranche of magical realism Murakami-style than an undisguised case study of the young ”hermits” across Japan who wall themselves up in their bedrooms for months on end because they cannot face the lives that society has in store for them.

More telling is the way that Murakami links this problem of social withdrawal to the bloody vignette featuring the Chinese prostitute, whose assailant is a well-heeled salaryman who camps out in his office every night in order to avoid his family. The man’s only memory of the assault is an aching hand, which he nurses with a self-pity that jars unpleasantly with his amnesia about the violence just past. The analogy with Japan’s persistent ”forgetfulness” about its war in China is simply too potent to resist; and from here it is a short step to the idea that Japan’s young people retreat from the present because the nation itself is in full flight from the past. All this from the writer who once declared that reading was just another form of light entertainment - but if Murakami wants to keep upping the ante, his readers are unlikely to complain.

Margaret Hillenbrand is lecturer in Chinese studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University.