Haruki Murakami, Japan’s best-selling novelist, likes his protagonists troubled, in love, work, and play. Except they never get to play much. In Dance Dance Dance (1994, ISBN 978-0-679-75379-7) Murakami’s protagonist’s occasional insecurities are augmented by the fact that his name is not mentioned once in this 393 page book in which the story is told in the first person.   

The protagonist is a restaurant reviewer, well aware of the fact that it’s a hack job, but pays the rent. He checks into a small hotel in Sapporo, which starts a cascading series of deaths of his acquaintances. Several of them are also linked to his friend Gotanda, a romantic lead actor in low-brow popular films, and much of the best dialogue in this book results from their conversations. Gotanda is jaded by his popularity, but is intelligent enough to verbalize lots of self-analysis. We here at WoWasis particularly enjoyed his take on pay-for-play, a philosophy that has been shared by many notables in the public eye:

“After my divorce, for a while there I would call up and these girls would come and spend the night. No fuss, no muss. I wasn’t up for an amateur and if I was sleeping with someone in the industry it’d be splashed all over the magazines. So that’s the companionship I had. They weren’t cheap, but they kept quiet about it. Absolutely confidential. A guy at the agency gave me an introduction to this c1ub and all the girls were nice and easy. Professional, but without the attitude. They enjoy themselves too.”

The book isn’t predictable, particularly given his bizarre friendship with a 13 year old girl who,  many readers will note with dread, represents the teen-ager from hell. To a large extent, the protagonist defines his life by his interaction with females, and when one high-end call girl friend of his gets murdered, the police step in and consider him the initial suspect. Deliciously, the actual killer is present for virtually the entire book.

Where we found fault with the book was in its crossing-over into the supernatural. Skeptics and freethinkers may very well have an issue with a plotline that causes them to suspend their belief systems, and our criticism is that Murakami is such a damn good writer that he could have been more effective, we think, if he’d kept some elements of the plot more realistic. Nevertheless, the book is worth reading. The author adeptly delves into the psychology of all his characters, and he’s terrific at dialogue. Our favorite character was Gotanda, the actor, and the conversations between he and the protagonist are terse, insightful, and to a large extent, carry the only clues the reader will get to understanding the ultimate outcome.

Buy Dance Dance Dance now at the WoWasis eStore.