Dance Dance Dance

"The world is full of ways and means to waste time."

I didn't enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed A Wild Sheep Chase unfortunately. It felt like there was less of a plot in this one, and Murakami laid on the magical realism really thickly. I'm not even sure I really understood most of the themes by the end. As such, this one felt more like A Day in the Life of a Protagonist than anything else, where he drinks a lot, pines after a receptionist while also looking for his girlfriend(?), ogles a 14 year old girl for an uncomfortably long period of the book, and deals with a flaky former classmate with a surprising amount of tolerance. There's only the thinnest amount of plot threads snaking through this one, and Murakami's writing wasn't enough to keep me interested in what was going on all of the time.

As far as I'm concerned (and maybe I'm blaspheming here), you don't need to have read either of the first two books in this series to read either A Wild Sheep Chase or this one. Even AWSC could theoretically be skipped without missing too much of what's going on in this one, as beyond the repeated location of the Dolphin Hotel and one scene with the Sheep Man, there's not a lot of overlap. Maybe I would see more overlap if I were better at seeing complex themes and such, but whatever.

I'm glad to have read it, but it's very clearly one of Murakami's earliest books.