Amazon.co.uk: Dance, Dance, Dance: Books: Haruki Murakami

In short: Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight.

Thoughts: Having extolled the virtues of Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, I picked up Dance Dance Dance next entirely by chance, not realising it was a semi-sequel and an epilogue to Murakami’s ‘trilogy of the rat‘. Nor was I aware that these books were his first literary forays. Serendipity? All too apt.

Dance Dance Dance follows in a similar mold to A Wild Sheep Chase, taking up the reigns with the same main character trying to make sense of things. A series of dreams draws him back toward the Dolphin hotel, and the girl with the spectacular ears he lost during the sheep chase. Pretty soon the story is going off on all kinds of tangents, but not quite as random as the previous novel. Strangely though, the plot doesn’t feel quite as ‘tight’ – if that’s the right word. For sure, Sheep Chase was deliriously random, but the Chandler-esque plot and omimous villains gave it something more of a purpose, a goal, even if that goal was just a speck on the horizon. Our hero’s quest in DDD is very much his own, and he spends vast amounts of time just taking it easy, doing nothing, watching where the wind blows and whatever characters are blown in with it. Nevertheless, the sheer atmosphere of the novel captured me entirely. Murakami’s great strengths are the vividness of his world, the spark of his dialogue and the bittersweetness of his characters. The chemistry is all here, and even if some parts seemed irrelevant or contrived, I couldn’t help but react with a glow.