After Dark, by Haruki Murakami, trans Jay Rubin

In 'After Dark', Haruki Murakami's ninth full-length novel to appear in English, he returns to a theme he has perused in most of his previous novels: the suggestion that the way a person behaves is not necessarily the result of his psychology or upbringing, but can be influenced by mystical, malign forces (sometimes connected to animals) outside his control. Murakami has explored this narrative interest through giving characters mischievous or occasionally malevolent doppelgangers, and linking seemingly unconnected individuals in supernatural ways. Throughout his career, his vision has grown steadily darker. In After Dark, a novel that takes place over the course of a single night, he has a character named Takahashi suggest that all human behaviour is controlled by an evil octopus who lives at the bottom of the ocean.

Takahashi makes this observation to a young woman named Eri, a character who constantly measures herself against her more attractive sister Mari, a fairy-tale presence referred to as "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty". But unbeknown to Eri, perfect Mari has been sucked into her own netherworld, drawn from her bed through a TV set to an alternate reality where she is watched by a sinister man in a plastic mask.

Another separation has occurred to Korogi, the owner of a love hotel named Alphaville: an allusion to Godard's 1965 film. Part of the inspiration for Murakami's darkening vision is the series of disasters that Japan has experienced in recent years, such as the Sarin gas attack or the Kobe earthquake. Here, something unknown happened to Korogi at the time of the earthquake that transformed her from an ordinary office worker into a madam. Murakami makes oblique, coded reference to the recent hikikomori phenomenon, a condition where Japanese adults and adolescents withdraw from normal life to live a nocturnal solitary existence. Murakami has made reference in interviews to fearing he might die when working on a novel, and he introduces this concern here as his characters try to contemplate the nothingness that will follow the end of existence.

In case readers have missed the significance of his splintered characters, Murakami explicitly refers to "dualism" towards the end of the novel. Yet he uses it in an oddly prosaic way given the mysticism elsewhere in the book, describing how office workers are both individuals yet also a part of the movement of the city as a whole. The return to daylight at the conclusion suggests an escape from the terrors of the night.

Murakami used to run a jazz bar and lead his own nocturnal existence, but he now rises at dawn. There is a suggestion that in being awake throughout the night, the characters have deliberately put themselves in danger. He writes about how humans have only relatively recently started to stay up all night rather than disappearing into a cave at sundown, and how this might be a mistake. But this seems confusing, as he presents sleep as equally (or more) dangerous.

Murakami's oeuvre is becoming increasingly perplexing. Recent novels such as Sputnik Sweetheart or Kafka on the Shore have received mixed reviews; Murakami responded by suggesting that the latter needed to be read twice to be fully understood. After Dark feels like an important Murakami novel, yet as with Kafka on the Shore there, is a sense that the most significant parts of the narrative have been deliberately hidden deep beneath the deceptively simple surface. The book is undoubtedly worth reading, but it's hard to work out whether the novel is a dream or a nightmare, or (as one character suggests) somewhere in between.

Matt Thorne's latest novel is 'Cherry' (Phoenix)

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