Haruki Murakami, whose global popularity is singular, has never seemed like a typical Japanese author. Indeed, he has taught American audiences to look for American names in foreign fiction. A Denny’s restaurant and a 7-Eleven — along with a love hotel named for Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” — anchor the fictional Tokyo landscape of Mr. Murakami’s new novel, “After Dark” (Knopf, 191 pages, $22.95). His previous novels include “A Wild Sheep Case,” which, alas, could be described as Raymond Chandler on acid, and “Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” which features both Bob Dylan and Lauren Bacall. In 2003, he translated the “Catcher in the Rye” into Japanese, and he could seriously be called the J.D. Salinger of the Northern Hemisphere.

Yet “After Dark” sets its sights on Tokyo and marshals a host of stereotypical Japanese motifs — immersive technology, the sex industry, and gangsters on motorcycles. Mr. Murakami almost seems to be mocking the metaphor of the Japanese megalopolis: “Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old.”

Mr. Murakami notably left Japan after the 1987 publication of “Norwegian Wood,” a novel of youthful confusion so popular that it threatened to make its author into a TV celebrity. He returned in 1995, just as his masterpiece, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” was published. That novel self-consciously took on the massacres committed by the Japanese army on the Chinese mainland. Two subsequent books dealt, respectively, with the Kobe earthquake and the sarin attack in the Tokyo subway. His next long novel, “Kafka on the Shore,” cast Mr. Murakami’s persistent magical realism as an igneous formation of volcanic Shinto multiplicity.

It could be said, then, that, in the past decade, Mr. Murakami’s writing has been at once more substantial and more centered on Japan. In 2003, Mr. Murakami stated in an interview that his ambition was, increasingly, to capture a given society:

The only thing for me to do, I think, is to create new work by piling one story on top of another in a multi-layered way — in other words, to make a ‘comprehensive novel’—something Dostoevskyan, nineteenth century … A kind of microcosm.

“After Dark” definitely reads like the first experiment of that ambition.

Throughout, the conceit of a 19th-century novel takes on a cute, postmodern life of its own. On page 1, the top-down view of the megalopolis, quoted above, has to be explained: We are seeing Tokyo through “the eyes of a high-flying night bird.” Elsewhere, we intrude on a sleeping girl’s bedroom in the guise of a floating movie camera.

The core of the novel, meanwhile, is vintage Murakami. Mari, a superserious 19-year-old, meets a gentle jazz musician named Takahashi at an all-night Denny’s. Takahashi wants to study law — he talks a philosophy of justice worthy of Victor Hugo. He introduces Mari to Kaoru, the proprietress of a love hotel, and together they try to help a Chinese prostitute who has been badly beaten. Mr. Murakami then catches up with her attacker, a salaryman. The rest of this short novel enjoys the frisson of missed connections, as the Chinese gang hunts the salaryman and crosses paths with Takahashi. Mari’s sleeping sister meanwhile enters an alternate universe, adding a metaphysical layer to this societal layer cake.

Although Mr. Murakami’s social realism may sound flimsy, it works as it’s read. Mr. Murakami has always paid more attention to dreams than to reality, and the best thing about “After Dark” is its cohesive atmosphere, one of delay and suspense, as time slows down and everybody gets the creeps. If Mr. Murakami were to attempt a 24-hour epic, his would emphasize the night as James Joyce emphasized the day. “After Dark” is the rare novel that should have been longer.

Teru Miyamoto’s first book in English translation, “Kinshu: Autumn Brocade” (New Directions, 196 pages, $14.95) is an epistolary novel featuring unlikely correspondents. Yasuaki and Aki were divorced after Yasuaki almost died in a double suicide with another woman. The subtle openings the two give each other to write about these events, 10 years later, must represent some of the most felt and least contrived plotting in any epistolary novel ever. Mr. Miyamoto creates characters who trust their feelings without quite understanding them. Thus, as Aki listens to Mozart’s 39th symphony, she suddenly thinks of death: “And yet the word death crystallized inside and wouldn’t leave.” This is a writerly fiat of an order beyond Mr. Murakami’s concretized perspectives: It is the magical — and even omniscient — course of everyday intuition that leads Aki to contact her lost husband.

blytal@nysun.com