Murakami is a deceptively clever writer. He gives the reader a complicated puzzle, then drops surreal hints and abstract clues ever so deftly. You just feel compelled to figure out this maze of metaphors, dots and blanks, laced with humour, simplicity, and dark irony — enough to keep you entertained and provoked by the world’s seen and unseen forces.
Strangely, you begin to understand the bizarreness of not just Murakami’s work, but of life itself, in all its glory, gloom, mystery and beauty. Just as his protagonist is haunted by something at the beginning, something he must confront, you too are plunged straight into a labyrinth of loss, alienation and mystical elements. Murakami blends the real and the unreal with unimaginable brushstrokes that jolt the senses, leaving much to interpretation.
His sixth book, Dance, Dance, Dance, is one such book that rocks you into a rhythm that’s anything but gentle. Set in the eighties in a world of hookers, hotels, lurking energy bodies, premonitions and invisible powers that can make anything happen, and anyone disappear, the novel subtly exposes the underlying evil of capitalism and its victims. As one character puts it:
“Place your order in Tokyo and your girl is waiting in Honolulu… advanced capitalism churning out goods for every conceivable niche. Illusion, that was the key word.”
Written in the first person, the nameless protagonist is a lonely, divorced, depressed man in his mid-thirties, haunted by recurring dreams of a hotel and a hooker, Kiki, who disappeared. He describes his work as “shovelling snow — cultural snow,” a term Murakami uses frequently in humorous contexts with different characters. Both the hotel and Kiki are real, rooted in the past. Mr Nameless’s search for her takes him back to the Dolphin Hotel in Sapporo, where they once stayed together. But the old hotel, the kind that looked like a museum nobody except “peculiar’ people visited, has been replaced by a modern corporate mammoth — soulless, impersonal, and mysterious. The term ‘peculiar’ is so apt in these circumstances that one appreciates the effortless translation of this book by Alfred Birnbaum.
The current Dolphin Hotel is described as a “hotel within a hotel”. The new hotel has a sixteenth floor that literally and mysteriously opens into nowhere. So a no-land for a no-man like Nameless. Abyss. Classic Murakami. The new hotel is transformed, redeveloped, erased by concrete and capitalism–the real unseen evil. A metaphor for what the world becomes when buried under wealth and power. “Energies expended on sideshows. Where the hell was the main event?” Someone muses. “Was there a main event?”
The clues to Kiki’s disappearance become the journey itself, later sketched as a diagram when Nameless tries to make sense of a sudden murder. Along the way, he meets bizarre characters.
An over-charming film star in love with his ex-wife.
Two more hookers, one of whom is rendered unforgettable with a short one-time conversation.
An uptight hotel receptionist whose neat dressing somehow endears her.
A most intriguing ‘Sheep Man’ who is paradoxically also the voice of wisdom and guidance.
A precocious, psychic teenage girl, Yuki, who lives with Talking Heads playing in her Walkman. And she does not like “Boy George”.
She is often abandoned by her absent-minded, famous photographer mother. The mom even forgets to stub her cigarettes, something that her one-armed poet lover does for her. Besides slicing bread with one hand.
There is a hilarious discussion on “two-armed people” at a certain tragic moment between Yuki and Nameless. Murakami simply delights with his mastery of displaying wicked humour and compassion all at once.
Even the two nameless cops, nicknamed “Fisherman” and “Bookish,” carry his signature humour and dread.
Murakami’s world is full of such opposites — absurd yet deeply humane. The famous film star- Gotanda’s luxurious lifestyle with Maserati, call girls, condos, masks a profound emptiness. He envies Nameless’ anonymity and simplicity, his modest Subaru, his lack of ambition. An entire tale of two cars–Subaru and Gotanda’s own smooth and extravagant Maserati–follows, taking unexpected plot turns, making the reader race along. Along the way, seemingly aimless, drunken conversations between Gotanda and Nameless make you their enraptured passenger.
Consumer desire and the downside of fame dominate most conversations. “This stuff isn’t real,” Gotanda rants. “It’s manufactured… just repeat the message, repeat the message… Azabu, BMW, Rolex, Azabu, BMW…” (Azabu is an expensive residential area in Tokyo.) There it is again — the capitalist trap, laid bare. Represented by these two characters, it hits home. Hard.
As Nameless encounters these people, gradually you realise that Nameless has started transforming through them, from a drifting and depressed observer to someone who has started connecting like in the past. Having left ‘shovelling snow’, he begins to thaw. Along with him, we too start caring deeply for Yuki with her headphones, her guarded loneliness, and her “drag sneer”.
While we unravel Kiki’s mystery, Murakami fills the quiet stretches with coffee shops, silent drives with Yuki and rock ’n’ roll music, Hawaiian holidays, with a gentle melancholy that feels more real than the plot itself. He makes you live inside the journey like a dream — that haze and that daze — as if it’s just you and the character, suspended in shared time. It’s intimate, enchanting, introspective, and rich with observations about fortunate and unfortunate people, societal pressures, politics, relationships, and those quiet moments of life, both ordinary and extraordinary.
Just when we sink into that lull, he jolts us awake with a twist, a murder, a revelation.
But it’s never about the plot, as throughout, Nameless drifts into replaying memories of the dead. Murakami does not tire of describing those moments with the same words, same sentences, as if language itself is looping like loss. Even a certain word exchanged between the unforgettable hooker and Nameless – “Cuck-koo”. Every time he thinks of her, the word appears.
It’s sheer hypnosis. Until it dawns on you — it’s a meditation on grief, and how we learn to live with it. And somewhere in all this, Murakami leaves us with a quiet philosophy of life:
“No promises you’re gonna be happy… so you gotta dance. Dance so it all keeps spinning.”
And so Nameless keeps dancing, moving with the natural rhythm of life, waiting in the silences. Does he ever find Kiki? Do we ever learn what truly happened to the old Dolphin Hotel? It doesn’t matter. The book leaves you strangely and deeply satisfied.
By the end, it feels as if Murakami has peeled off layer after layer of an onion — luminous, pink, raw — holding each with empathy. And yet, when it’s done, you’re left with a powerful desire to have a long conversation with the man himself.
But perhaps he’s too busy dancing to care.
