Truthfully, I don't get the appeal of this book. It all comes together in a hodgepodge of existential aimlessness and dream-like narrative. Murakami comments on consumerism, pop culture, and longing in love. It involves the lost loves of the writer.

It involves a writer who is unhappy writing ad copy and restaurant reviews.

It involves a middle-aged man's friendship with a teenage girl. It involves some sort of supernatural portal in a hotel. I won't recount the plot (such as it is) itself. This tells me that people in advanced cultures around the world share many cultural similarities, and/or that the Japanese embrace American culture. The whole story seemed very American, from my American perspective. But the vast majority of the references to movies, music, and literature are Western. I thought Murakami, a Japanese novelist, would give me a window to contemporary Japanese culture. It's not terrible, it was just sort of pointless. Even though he's a respected, award-winning novelist, I didn't particularly enjoy Dance Dance Dance.

I picked it up after reading his wonderful memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. This is the first of his novels I've read. Most other sites rank it in the middle single digits (among his couple of dozen novels). (Jan.I found a web site that ranked Haruki Murakami's novels. If Mishima had ever learned the value of gentleness, this is the sort of page-turner he might have written. 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. In his searchings, he encounters a clairvoyant 13-year-old, her misguided parents and a one-armed poet. 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). The unnamed narrator, a muddled freelance writer, is 34 and no closer to finding happiness than he was in the previous book. In this impressive sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami displays his talent to brilliant effect.

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