Murakami Fills Tokyo Night With Catatonic Model, Jazzman, Whore

May 16 (Bloomberg) -- Even when set in broad daylight, Haruki Murakami's fiction evokes a twilit world where the humdrum rules of reality relax. His lean and mysterious new novel, ``After Dark,'' unfolds over a single Tokyo night.

Its central characters are mousy student Mari and her stunning older sister, a model named Eri. For two months, Eri has been lost in an unnaturally deep sleep. On this particular night, Mari, too worried to sleep herself, hunkers down with coffee and cigarettes in a Denny's eatery.

She's ensconced in a booth with a book when one of her sister's former admirers, Takahashi, an aspiring jazz trombonist, spots her, signaling the start of an adventure whose backdrop shifts from a bar to a deserted park and a ``love hotel.'' Along the way, Murakami introduces a vivid cast including a retired female wrestler, a Chinese prostitute and a violent salaryman.

Sleeping beauty Eri meanwhile slumbers on -- or so it seems. She's actually locked in a metaphysical battle with unseen forces, whose outcome will determine whether she lives or dies.

These strands form an engrossing, charmingly romantic escapade that riffs on melancholic themes of alienation and identity. Deftly translated by Jay Rubin, ``After Dark'' is published by Knopf in the U.S. and Harvill Secker in the U.K. (208 pages, $22.95, 14.99 pounds).

Palahniuk's `Rant'

Nighttime is no time to be out and about in a Chuck Palahniuk novel. His latest book, ``Rant,'' masquerades as an oral biography of antihero Buster ``Rant'' Casey.

Pieced together from the testimonies of friends, family and acquaintances, the story tracks Rant's rollercoaster ride from small-town rebel to ``America's walking, talking Biological Weapon of Mass Destruction.''

Conceived when a sex offender raped his mother, Rant develops an early fixation on animal bites and stings, offering his limbs to snakes, scorpions and coyotes for kicks. Now carrying rabies, Rant moves to the big city and becomes involved in ``party crashing,'' a violent game that has nothing to do with attending fetes uninvited. In this pastime, Rant drives around hunting for other participants to smash into -- a demolition derby in street-legal cars.

Palahniuk sets this gory, polyphonic account in the future, conjuring a world in which overpopulation forces people to live in shifts of Nighttimers and Daytimers. Experience is downloaded from a device that plugs into the brain.

Palahniuk pumps enough adrenaline into his gross-out fables to make even squeamish readers read on. For all the blood, guts and bodily fluids that splatter his prose, he also knows that tenderness packs a punch. Yet his strengths highlight the novel's lack of coherency, and not even a time-travel twist can save it.

``Rant'' is from Doubleday in the U.S. and Cape in the U.K. (336 pages, $24.95, 12.99 pounds).

Faulks's `Engleby'

Sebastian Faulks's new novel, ``Engleby,'' marks a welcome departure. In place of the syrupy sentimentalism that marred his name-making bestseller, ``Birdsong,'' the author here brings a creepily compelling narrator and dark humor to bear on a tale of murder and insanity.

As a boy, working-class Mike Engleby is beaten by his father before winning a scholarship to a private school where the bullying is worse. From there, he progresses to the University of Cambridge, which is where we meet him in the late 1970s.

A cocky loner, Mike is light-fingered and washes down a daily assortment of pills with large quantities of booze. He takes solitary drives in the surrounding Fens and prefers to eat alone in pubs rather than in his college canteen. Remarkably thick-skinned, he is entirely lacking in empathy, and soon switches from English Literature to Natural Sciences.

Mike is smart, and his zany reflections on prog rock and critical theory pad out a plot whose pace picks up when he forms an obsessive crush on Jennifer, a fellow student who later goes missing, presumed murdered.

While the authorities gradually eke out what befell Jennifer that bitterly cold evening, Mike graduates to a job as a magazine journalist and thrives in Thatcherite Britain. Gaps in his narrative grow increasingly glaring, though, and it's no surprise when the police come calling.

``Engleby'' is from Hutchinson (342 pages, 17.99 pounds).

(Hephzibah Anderson is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Hephzibah Anderson at hephzibah_anderson@hotmail.com.