Haruki Murakami’s 1988 novel Dance Dance Dance, was my very first foray into his peculiar world (on the recommendation of my former and late officemate named Fae), turned out to be a strange, fascinating initiation.
Our guide through this otherworldly landscape is a 34-year-old unnamed narrator, a Tokyo-based freelance writer whose life is suspended between routines and detachment. Long abandoned by a wife who ran off with a friend (a loss he acknowledges with painful precision), he manages to survive, as he puts it, by “shoveling snow”, which has become Murakami’s metaphor for going through the motions of society without conviction or complaint.
But then come the dreams.
Recurrent and persistent, it pulls him back to a strange place: the Dolphin Hotel in Sapporo, where, years earlier, he had spent time with a mysterious woman named Kiki who vanished without explanation. What he finds upon returning is a gleaming, corporate transformation. The once-seedy hotel has been converted into a Westernized high-rise hotel, all polish and glass and none of the ghostly charm. Kiki, as expected, is nowhere to be found.
From there, Murakami’s novel unfolds with a kind of slow burn suspense, part noir, part metaphysical detective story. Our narrator falls into the orbit of a constellation of odd and compelling characters: an apathetic hotel receptionist harboring secrets of her own, a celebrity photographer and her aloof, brilliant 13-year-old daughter Yuki (a psychic with a taste for Talking Heads), a one-armed poet, a former classmate turned actor typecasted as a doctor, and the ever-strange “Sheep Man,” a cryptic figure residing in dreamlike corridors.
As murders and accidents begin to follow in the narrator’s wake, the plot swells with eerie tension, all the while pulsing with what I would later discover as Murakami’s signature motifs: alienation, parallel realities, and the quiet desperation of modern life. What grounds this novel and what elevates it is Murakami’s subtle yet unrelenting inquiry into human connection: What do we owe one another? What shapes our roles in the world? Can we ever truly understand another person, or ourselves?
The relationship between the narrator and Yuki, the withdrawn yet perceptive teenager, forms the emotional heart of the novel. In their unlikely friendship, Murakami offers moments of tenderness amid the strangeness. So too with the actor-friend, with whom our narrator shares wry philosophical musings on consumerism, status, and the quiet absurdity of adulthood. A Masserati or a Subaru, Murakami suggests, becomes more than a car, it becomes a measure of worth, a reflection of a society increasingly adrift in its own symbols.
At times, the novel recalls the genre-bending of Martin Amis’s Other People, especially in its metaphysical undertones. Yet Murakami’s voice remains distinct: cool, melancholic, dreamlike. The mystery at the heart of the book such as Who was Kiki? What is the Sheep Man? How are all these disparate lives interconnected? may not resolve cleanly, but that, one suspects, is the point. Life, like this novel, is filled with loose ends, missed signals, and fleeting moments of meaning.
Dance Dance Dance is many things: a metaphysical ghost story, a meditation on loneliness, a critique of late-capitalist culture, and, unexpectedly, a coming-of-age tale in disguise. That Murakami binds all of this together with such seamless narrative control is a testament to his brilliance.
For those unacquainted with Murakami, this novel might serve as a gateway into his larger universe. For me, it was an invitation not just to read more of his work, but to reflect more deeply on the figurative snow I myself have been shoveling.
Rating: ★★★★
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