Saturday, July 20, 2002
Title: Crawling At Night
Author: Nani Power
Publisher: Vintage
The words sordid and tawdry come to mind to describe the lives of the characters in Crawling At Night. A story that takes place over the period of a couple of days, yet manages to cover the entire lives of everyone involved. And it is fair to say that no one here seems to have had a good life.
Ito is the head chef in a sushi restaurant in New York; there he is attracted to one of the waitresses. He spots her drinking on the job, he decides this is bad, that he should give her a warning. But at the same time he feels that it wouldn't do any harm to ask her to dinner. She decides that she will meet him for dinner, but falls asleep in the bath and doesn't make it. The next day Marianne is cagey not sure how Ito will react, while Ito is hurt and confused. However that same day Marianne is fired by the restaurant owner. At the end of his working day Ito gets Marianne's address from the owner's records and goes out to find her. The rest of the story unfolding as they meet up and start to understand who each of them is.
Ito is a sushi chef, highly trained, like any of the other Japanese arts. With the death of his wife though this aging man finds himself in America, working for a younger man who maybe of Japanese descent but is more American than Japanese. For Ito the Americans don't understand sushi, the ritual and honour involved, rather it is novelty and instead of using nothing but the best he is encouraged to use only the cheapest. For years his relationship with his wife wasn't physical, so he used a woman at the local brothel, a woman he fell in love with. Now in America he has been stalking a woman he believes to be this same woman, tortured by his loneliness in this new country.
Marianne is an alcoholic, the daughter of an alcoholic. At the age of 16 she ran away, got herself married and pregnant and was an alcoholic before she was even 18. Her baby was taken off her and she ended up with another man in New York. Since then it has been a string of men and drinking, a consumption by her demons. The job in the restaurant is her third this year, and she has just been raped by the owner. Not sure what to do she carries on as though nothing has happened, though she is confused further by Ito's advances, especially when the owner fires her, increasingly worried that she will do something about what he did.
Crawling At Night follows the lives of these two characters, but in the process covers the lives of the people they meet - from the taxi driver to the girl that Ito is stalking. People who are mostly immigrants, people who are mostly chasing dreams that remain unattainable. A cast of the poor, a mother who works several jobs to raise her mentally handicapped son, a father who sells his daughter's body for a little extra money. Despite the grimness of the story the narrative seems to be presented with a certain upbeat feel, the balance between things that are going on now and the past allowing for a strong flow from start to finish.
With talk of what goes on behind the closed doors of restaurants and late night clubs in china town and a sushi chef in love with a waitress I had certain expectations as to what Crawling At Night was going to be about. While all those aspects are contained within the book, they aren't as I expected. Yet on the whole I found this to be an enjoyable read.
RVWR: PTR
July 2002
