A single night is a night too many in the company of Haruki Murakami’s petite and pretentious After Dark, which compelled reading if only to fully appreciate the limits of its grotesquely crude idioms. One half-imagined the book, which reads as an unintended pastiche of post-modern literature, to be a tragic misadventure in Japanese/English translation; but further reading proves that the disgrace lies squarely on the shoulders of Murakami. One thing is clear: This is not truly a novel; it’s a film treatment that has (unsurprisingly) failed to make it to celluloid, and therefore leaves the reader feeling woefully short-changed. Somewhere within this mess there are some interesting ideas related to personal and interpersonal dichotomies, but they are largely muted set amongst the laughably poor dialogue and clichéd imagery.

Far too close to a high-school attempt at a grown-up novel, After Dark is an out-and-out disappointment that merely masquerades as a radical piece of literature.