For those not depressed enough by Mike Figgis' 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas, Nani Power has prepared a similarly desolate tale of prostitution and prostration: Her debut novel, Crawling By Night, follows some of Vegas' broadest themes, but distinguishes itself by both its narrative complexity and its comparatively cold calculation. Crawling By Night's two most significant protagonists, elderly Japanese expatriate Katsuyuki Ito and disintegrating alcoholic Mariane, work together at a Manhattan sushi restaurant, until its owner takes Mariane's "no" for "yes, but I want to be forced." When he subsequently fires her, Ito pursues her and attempts to repair her damaged life. Both characters have long and ugly histories: Ito's in Japan, where he frequented a prostitute while his wife was dying of cancer, and Mariane's along the East Coast, where early sexual molestation, early marriage, and early motherhood started her along the road to professional drunkenness. Both have unpleasant sexual baggage, Ito with his apartment full of pornography and his obsession with a local club singer/call girl, Mariane with her habit of having sex with anyone who buys her a drink. And both live under the bleak cloud of protective delusions. Power whizzes through their stories, disregarding traditional punctuation and sentence structure in her race to turn dialogue into narrative and narrative into poetry. She jumps backwards and forwards in time, and in and out of the heads of the many desperate people Ito and Mariane encounter, with a fervor that quickly develops an admirable kinetic energy but still lacks focus. The author's stylistic tricks are many and varied: Broad congruities and subtle connections emerge, elaborate cultural comparisons are made, Japanese literature is evoked, motifs (mainly sex and food) are established and dutifully observed. But the elaborately clever style sometimes proves distancing. Some of the book's flaws could be chalked up to sloppiness, particularly the many bilingual characters' disturbing tendency to not only speak in broken English, even when talking with people who share their native language, but to think in pidgin as well—in spite of an otherwise touching central theme involving Ito's frustration over the language barrier, which turns him from a melancholy poet-scholar into a babbling child. But mostly, the story seems a bit too structured and a bit too pat, as all of the characters have hidden connections and hidden parallels that gush out unrelievedly over the course of its slight 234 pages. Crawling At Night is an artful, sophisticated book, but its art is the biggest barrier to its imitation of life.