The latest from literary superstar Haruki Murakami focuses principally on what happens to two sisters between 11:52pm and 6:52am in a single night. Mari Asai is a 19-year-old university student holed up in a Tokyo Denny's, reading a thick book and drinking coffee, refusing sleep as an anomalous act of protest. Her older sister Eri is a model and the object of Mari's protest: she has been in bed, mysteriously withdrawn into a state of prolonged slumber, for two months.

Just over 200 pages and constructed from straightforward, almost flat-footed prose, After Dark is a disarming, wide-awake excursion into the witching hour and beyond. In the course of the night, each of the sisters embarks on a journey. Both characters — the shy Mari and the dozing Eri — are passive entities, to whom the novel happens. Mari's story involves a series of run-ins — with a skinny jazz musician, the manager of a love hotel, and a badly beaten Chinese prostitute. Eri's story takes the form of a fantastical adventure into an unplugged television set that comes alive à la Poltergeist. Despite existing on two seemingly independent planes with discrete trajectories, their stories share a difficult-to-define connection to a third tale — that of a salaryman working the graveyard shift and hiding a violent secret.

Murakami has been previously likened to a kind of diurnal David Lynch — a writer who embraces the waking hours as a choice temporality for his dreamlike fictions and so achieves a surreal, broad-daylight noir. With After Dark, Murakami proves that he is equally at home delivering his trademark inversions of reality in the dead of night. The novel masterfully builds its nocturnal ambiance; with time serving the function of setting, the mundane — including the simple choice to sleep or remain awake — accumulates atmosphere and significance.

While fans of Murakami's deeper forays into magical realism may be left wanting for a mystical sheep or two, they will find satisfaction in the invisible connections that this compact novel both suggests and demands exist — between day and night, life and death, dreams and reality, and two sisters who couldn't be more different from one another.

-Stephen Dougherty