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.