Murakami's celebrated oeuvre falls into two easily distinguished categories: there are the broad-canvas epics (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1997, for example), which meld genres, distort reality, and posit alternate worlds with abandon but do it all on the crest of an almost Dickensian tidal wave of story. And there are the small-scale, disarmingly intimate, almost tactile short novels (Sputnik Sweetheart, 2001, among others), jewel-like examinations of loneliness and secret selves. His latest effort falls into the second camp: the action takes place during one long Tokyo night, from midnight to dawn, and centers on two sisters, one, Eri, a fashion model, does nothing but sleep (though she may or may not drift between worlds in the process); her college-student sister, Mari, on the other hand, refuses to sleep, spending the night first drinking coffee in a Denny's and then in a series of encounters with an ever-more-strange group of night people, ranging from an introspective jazz musician to a Chinese prostitute, to the earth-motherish proprietor of a love hotel. The narrative flows like a jazz ballad, excruciatingly slow yet hypnotically entrancing (Time moves in its own way in the middle of the night, opines a bartender. You can't fight it). Each character is unique in his or her form of loneliness, yet each possesses a capacity for momentary empathy that is both sweet and heartbreaking. Murakami's genius, on both large and small canvases, is to create worlds both utterly alien and disconcertingly familiar.

Casual acquaintances and complete strangers alike meet and pass during the small hours of a Tokyo night, in the terse, riddling new novel from Japanese master Murakami ( Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman , stories, 2006, etc.). Its characters are ships in the night that carry cargoes of suppressed emotion and unresolved desires; hence their interactions comprise a spare narrative quite different from Murakami's hip, weird epics ( The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , Kafka on the Shore ) and more reminiscent of such plaintive tales of unrequited or misdirected affections as Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart . It begins "around midnight" as young trombonist Takahashi invites himself to join college student Mari, as she's studying in an all-night Denny's restaurant. Though he recalls meeting her while courting the attention of Mari's beautiful sister Eri, Mari seems indifferent—until Takahashi (realizing Mari speaks Chinese) persuades her to assist his friend Kaoru (who manages an all-night "love hotel") in helping a Chinese prostitute who's been savagely beaten by one of her johns. Characters thus brought together subsequently split off, as Murakami's omniscient narrator focuses alternately on the abusive john (a computer specialist, Shirakawa) and on the aforementioned Eri, who is observed languishing in a death-like sleep from which she emerges only randomly and briefly—and whose mysterious condition is somehow linked to Shirakawa. The connection is never fully explained, as the advancing hours bring the sleepless in and out of one another's orbits, and the realistic details of Murakami's enigmatic plot are deployed to suggest how—whether by design or by chance—we are all simultaneously involved in one another's lives and prohibited from fully understanding, or even entering, other people's "worlds." The result is a pellucid dramatization of disconnection, alienation, the hunger for human contact and the strategies by which we all manage to "make it through the night." A seductive and gratifying intellectual and romantic adventure.