If New York is the city that never sleeps, Tokyo is the city of sleepless souls — or so it appears in the cinematic narrative of "After Dark," among the most hauntingly detached of Haruki Murakami's nine novels published in English, and among his shortest.
The entire story line unspools in the minutes of a single night's pivot into daybreak, between 11:56 p.m. and 6:52 a.m., with a single act of unseen physical brutality at its center. Headings appear on alternate pages indicating the passing minutes, and each chapter begins with images of an analog clock, its hands shifting forward incrementally, as if to alert us to the meaning in each moment.
Notably absent is the first-person narrator, or the boku (I) novel, that has become one of Murakami's signature storytelling charms, exuding a sense of warmth that can describe the dark and surreal with whimsy and affection. Its motto might be: Whatever happens, do no harm.