Nani Power: Crawling at night

By PENELOPE BIEDER*

Over 48 hours in lower Manhattan we meet Katsuyuki Ito, a newly arrived sushi master who works in a Chelsea restaurant, Sugibar, and Mariane, a slightly older waitress from North Carolina, still coltish and clumsy, but as sluggish as the alcohol that never leaves her alone.

Ito quietly watches while Mariane surreptitiously slugs vodka in an espresso cup.

We also meet a host of other itinerant characters who fade in and out of a good story and almost threaten to stall it with their brief life stories - almost but not quite, because this remains a sensual love story about two sad people, both alone in their high-rise apartments in a big, noisy city.

Japanese Ito mourns his dead wife and former mistress while he slumps on his sighing leather couch reading manga comics. Mariane, made of "frail Dresden china with a crack", has been unable to deal with the loss of her daughter Daisy to adoption 15 years before.

While Nani Power has based her first novel around the big themes of sorrow and loss, she has made sure it is also hugely entertaining, sexually explicit in an unadorned way, and viscerally disgusting in its calm dissection of raw food and body parts. Each chapter is headed by food - Twinkies, Sake, Wasabi Fried Peas, Bonito - and every page is filled with its flavour as Ito goes about making sushi, with plenty of time to dream and reminisce.

Ito is a wonderful characterisation, Mariane somewhat less so: "Mariane wakes up in a sweat - her face is sore from sleeping on the windowsill. For how long?" You get the drift. She is deeply dedicated to her drinking and seems trapped by a desperate past.

Yobai (crawling at night), the author explains, "is an antiquated expression born of the Japanese farmer's tradition of accommodating large groups of overnight visitors on futons across the floor. If a gentleman visitor wished to attempt to share the futon of a fellow lady traveller, he would cover his face with cloth in a a gesture of anonymity, proceed to crawl to her futon and invite himself. If rejected, he could return to his futon unknown, at least in theory."

Manhattan is full of people such as Mariane and Ito, reaching out, withdrawing, moving on. A captivating first half of this novel is not served by its patchy second half - but in spite of this it still leaves you hungry for more.

Random House

$26.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.