Dance Dance Dance

Haunted by the sound of someone weeping softly for him, a man in his mid-thirties returns to northern Hokkaido to find her. By the author of A Wild Sheep Chase. 25,000 first printing.

In this impressive sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase , Murakami displays his talent to brilliant effect. The unnamed narrator, a muddled freelance writer, is 34 and no closer to finding happiness than he was in the previous book. Divorced, bereaved and abandoned by his various lovers, he is drawn to the Dolphin Hotel--a strange and lonely establishment where Kiki, a woman he once lived with, "upped and vanished." Kiki and the Sheep Man, an odd fellow who wears a sheepskin and speaks in a toneless rush, visit the narrator in visions that lead him to two mysteries, one metaphysical (how to survive the unsurvivable) and the other physical (a call girl's murder). In his searchings, he encounters a clairvoyant 13-year-old, her misguided parents and a one-armed poet. All the hallmarks of Murakami's greatness are here: restless and sensitive characters, disturbing shifts into altered reality, silky smooth turns of phrase and a narrative with all the momentum of a roller coaster. If Mishima had ever learned the value of gentleness, this is the sort of page-turner he might have written. Paperback rights to Vintage.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Once again, Murakami (Hard-Boiled Wonderland, 1991) limns in meticulous detail the life of an ordinary young man irrevocably changed by a troubling encounter with another world--this time, in a sequel to his debut novel, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989). Like most Murakami protagonists, the divorced narrator is a savvy consumer of everything current from music to food, but he's also a realist--a journalist who writes unsigned features and describes his work as ``shovelling snow--you do it because somebody's got to, not because it's fun.'' Emotionally numb, he is increasingly troubled by dreams in which former lover Kiki, who disappeared from the run-down Dolphin Hotel in Sapporo, where they'd been staying, seems to be calling him. When an assignment takes him to Sapporo, he decides to stay in the Dolphin--only to find it replaced by a new building. But remnants of the old hotel may survive: a young clerk, Miss Yumiyoshi, relates her late-night encounter with an impenetrable darkness and musty smell on the 16th floor. He investigates and meets the old Sheep Man, a son of the original owner ``living in hiding from the system,'' who advises him to ``dance as long as the music plays.'' And dance--another variation of E.M. Forster's ``only connect''--the narrator does, as he befriends Yuki, left in the hotel by her artist mother; continues his search for Kiki; meets up with a high-school chum; and courts Miss Yumiyoshi. But he is also haunted by death and intimations of another world: a prostitute he knew is murdered, another acquaintance dies, his actor-friend commits suicide, and Kiki herself may have been strangled. Despairing, he returns to the Dolphin, has a terrifying dream, and though he and Miss Yumiyoshi become lovers, he is aware that ``this world is more fragile, more tenuous than we ever could know.'' Despite intentions and effects that are sometimes too strained: a sobering descent into a contemporary hell--with a guide who's made it brilliantly his own dark literary domain. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

There are only a handful of writers in the world who have the ability to thrill like Murakami. Skipping lightly, he has managed to dodge the triple curse of late-twentieth century literary fashion. No political realism, no magic realism, and no postmodernist retooling here. Leaping straight out of the slightly slow-witted but earthy and vigorous head of genre fiction, he has landed on the other side of our age, bypassing altogether the school of elegant repetition and self-conscious significance so admired by the publishing houses of London, New York, and Paris. Employing the flat tone of American writers like Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Carver and peppering his narratives with allusions to the plastic and materialistic world around him, Murakami yet manages to spin fantastic and surprisingly spiritual yarns as odd and riveting--though a good deal more uplifting--as the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. As in almost all his other works, the protagonist of Dance is an ordinary guy, a reluctant but curious participant in events revolving around the intersection of our world with one very unlike it. The real hero of the tale is a sheepman living in a different dimension within the heart of a modern hotel, a sort of shaman the narrator met before in Wild Sheep Chase (1989), the novel which first established Murakami's reputation in this country. Along with these characters is a clairvoyant teenage girl, a one-armed beach-combing poet, two or three extremely erotic prostitutes, a lonely and slightly sinister filmstar, and a nervous desk clerk. How these odd characters fit into Murakami's wild and hilarious idea of a plot is impossible to describe, but once picked up, Dance is hard to put down. Unfortunately, while the twists in Murakami's imagination carry the reader along, the novel wilts in one or two places, which may disappoint some readers after the never-takes-a-breath action of the finer Hardboilded Wonderland and the End of the World (1991). Still, this is a wholly endearing tale, very sexy, very adult, and in its own way very tender. Murakami is truly a novelist like no other. Stuart Whitwell

If Kafka were to find himself imprisoned in a novel that had been written by Raymond Chandler and was then forced to develop a sense of humor, the resultant voice might likely resemble that of the protagonist in this latest delight from one of Japan's leading contemporary writers. Something of a sequel to 1988's A Wild Sheep Chase ( LJ 10/15/89), this book features an ordinary man on an extraordinary journey living in a world glittering with technology in which something is wanting still. Fans of the first book will certainly want to read this one, although Dance Dance Dance stands quite well on its own. The relentless coyness and flippancy that characterized A Wild Sheep Chase gives way here to passages that are sometimes lyrical and an ending that is at once desperate, affirmative, and filled with the breath of life. Recommended for all serious fiction collections.
- Mark Woodhouse, Elmira Coll. Lib., N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.