Dance Dance Dance (novel)

The novel follows the surreal misadventures of an unnamed protagonist who makes a living as a commercial writer. He is compelled to return to the Dolphin Hotel, a seedy establishment where he once stayed with a woman he loved, despite the fact he never even knew her real name. She has since disappeared without a trace and the Dolphin Hotel has been purchased by a large corporation and converted into a slick, fashionable, Western-style hotel.

The protagonist experiences dreams in which this woman and the Sheep Man—a strange individual dressed in an old sheep skin who speaks in unpunctuated tattoo—appear to him and lead him to uncover two mysteries. The first is metaphysical in nature—how to survive the unsurvivable. The second is the murder of a call girl in which an old school friend of the protagonist, now a famous film actor, is involved circumstantially. Along the way, the protagonist meets a clairvoyant and troubled thirteen-year-old girl, her equally troubled parents, a one-armed poet, and a sympathetic receptionist who shares some of his disturbingly real visions.

Several of the novel's characters are hallmarks of Murakami's writing. Dance Dance Dance deals with themes of gender, sexuality, loss and abandonment, as do many of Murakami's other novels. Often, the male protagonist in a Murakami novel will lose a mother, spouse, or girlfriend. Other common Murakami themes this novel includes are technology, alienation, absurdity and the ultimate discovery of a human connection.

There is a character in the story named Hiraku Makimura, which is an anagram of "Haruki Murakami". The novel's Makimura is also a best-selling author and writer.

The supernatural character known as the Sheep Man speaks differently between the two versions. The character speaks normal Japanese in the original work, but in the English translations, his speech is written without any spaces between words. Written Japanese does not typically demarcate words with spaces.

Dance Dance Dance received a 69% rating from the book review aggregator iDreamBooks based on seven critics' reviews.[2]

Dance Dance Dance (English edition) by Haruki Murakami; translated by Alfred Birnbaum.

• Hardcover ISBN 4-7700-1683-2, published in January 1994 by Kodansha International
• Paperback ISBN 0-6797-5379-6, published on January 31, 1995 by Vintage Press

• Exorcising Ghosts—Links to pages of reviews and articles
• Official Haruki Murakami Website