After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Alfred A. Knopf, $22.95

Call it the summer of the mini-novel. So far we've had terse offerings from Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach) and Don DeLillo (Falling Man), and Knopf just published the English translation of Haruki Murakami's slim 2004 novel After Dark. People who love Murakami seem to really love Murakami. I've had mixed reactions in the past, loving Kafka on the Shore but tiring of the belabored postmodern trickery of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the final chapters. After Dark ranks with his best work, mainly because he pushes the bizarre button far enough to tantalize us, but not too far to drown us in abstractions.

The story takes in Tokyo one night between midnight and dawn. A young woman, Mari, reads at Denny's, and ultimately winds up hanging out with the owner and former employee of a no tell motel (affectionately referred to by the staff as a "love hos"). Meanwhile her beautiful older sister, Eri, sleeps deeply in her bedroom while (and here's the bizarre part) events of unknown importance play out on the unplugged TV set by her bed. A business man who beats up a Chinese hooker at the love hos rounds out the dramatis personae.

After Dark is a very quick read, with lots of breezy dialogue and snappy prose that often reads like a screenplay. Eri's Mulholland Drive-esque predicament is trippy and, at times, hard to digest. By the novel's end, though,

the realism and the surrealism merge in a a satisfying and poetic fashion.