Dance, Dance, Dance, revisits the RAT trilogy and has the narrator search for Kiki, the woman with the beautiful ears, who he last saw in the Dolphin Hotel in Hokkaido. It was "her purpose" he explians to lead him to the hotel which she he describes as a "biological dead-end" (3). Apart from Kiki's disappearance, the Rat we discover has, in fact, died and been transformed into the Sheep Man. He took his life in Hokkaido after he had been possessed by the sheep, a malevolent spirit that takes control of those it possess in order to gain power. About the Sheep Man the narrator asks, “Why is he around? I don’t know. Maybe I needed him. Maybe because as you get older, things fall apart, so something needs to hold things together. Put the brakes a little on entropy, you know…” (
Dance, Dance, Dance, 194).
There is a sense of fatalism at work in the novel as the narrator says early on, "The story's already decided" (6). The idea that he has a lack of control over his own life is underlined when the narrator compares his life to a computer game which recalls the second book of the trilogy Pinball 1973: “I hardly had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. Some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death” (Dance, Dance, Dance, 210). This idea finds its ultimate expression in the concept of the switchboard which the Rat uses to explain how it is his job to keep the various parts of the narrators life connected through the switchboard. Finally, it is Kiki who explains to him that everything that exists in the parallel world in the old Dolphin Hotel is part of him.
Materialism and mindless greed are increasingly Murakami’s targets in this pre-Kobe earthquake and pre-Aum Sarin gas attack sequence of novels. If he is ambivalent about the student protests of the 1960s, he is unimpressed by the bubble economy of the 1980s. The protagonist notes in Dance, Dance Dance, “Not to overstate things, financial dealings have practically become a religious activity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porsches and Tokyo land values. Worshipping everything their shiny Porsches symbolize. It’s the only stuff of myth that’s left in the world.” The narrator reflects that things were simpler in 1969 (55).
Whilst materialism and greed are a concern in the novel, the narrator has to try to connect the various parts of his life which have come undown starting with Kiki. He is also unable to cry for what he has lost but he hears someone crying for him. Significantly he asks "Why would anyone want to cry for me?" (5). Sick of "shovelling cultural snow" for a living, the narrator goes to Hokkaido. He discovers the old Dolphin Hotel has disappeared and been replaced by a huge concrete, steel and glass tower. He meets a receptionist with an unusual name, Yumiyoshi, who has had a strange experience on an uninhabited floor in the hotel that ordinarily doesn't exist. It scared her badly. There was no light, no sound and the air was moldy (43). When she told her manager he told her to tell no-one. The narrator eventually finds this mysterious place and is reacquainted with the Rat. The Rat explains that this place is the knot, it is tied to everything, the things that you lost and the things that you are going to lose (83). The narrator has been worried for some time, however, that he will never get back to the "real world". Having met Yumiyoshi is a significant experience and he says, "I was jealous of the real world and her swim club" (77). In the meantime, however, he had seen a thirteen year old girl, Yuki, in a bar with her mother. When Yuki smiled at him, the narrator says, "I felt as if I had been chosen" (33). Later when she is abandoned by her mother, Yumiyoshi asks the narrator to accompany Yuki on his way back to Tokyo. The narrator is caught in a series of events whose significance are not yet clear.Yuki, it turns out, is also aware of the existance of the Sheep man. The only advice that the Rat has been able to give the narrator in the meantime is to keep dancing.
The narrator needless to say, forms a deep connection with Yuki and as the various elements in his life continue to unravel she is able to help him with crucial insights. When he reconnects with Gotanda, an old friend form junior high school who has become a well known actor, he spends the night with Mei, a high class prostitute. It is Mei who explains to the narrator that her name, like that of Kiki, has no reality, "These names don't have real lives. We're all image, signs tacked up on empty air" (156). When her dead body is found the narrator is picked up for questioning by the police but is released after he refuses to make an admission that he knew the dead girl. He is covering for his friend, Gotanda. It is Yuki with whom he dicusses these events. Watching her the narrator says, "She was truly a beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all" (208). When the narrator swaps cars and picks Yuki up in Gotanda's Maserati, she feels sick. It is Yuki who suggests that, "Maybe death's your connection to the world" (275).
The narrator sees Kiki again in his dreams and is taken to a room where there are six skeletons. He wonders who they are? Downstairs he finds a telephone number written on a piece of paper. After the deaths of the Rat and Mei comes the death of Dick North whom the narrator had met with Yuki in Hawaii. Later, when they watch Gotanda's movie together, Yuki feels sick again when she sees the scene where Gotanda has sex with Kiki. Yuki explains that Gotanda killed Kiki and put the body in the car which is why she felt sick. The narrator reassures that this isn't what happens in the movie but Yuki is adamant that that is what she felt. When the narrator suddenly asks Gotanada about this Gotanda himself is unsure, he feels that he did kill Kiki and it is because of a gap between his real self and a shadow self. He has commited many destructive acts since childhood because of this sense of unreality. His body is recovered from Tokyo Bay next morning after he drove the Maserati into the bay. Most of the skeletons that the narrator was shown in his dream are slowly being accounted for. The narrator says, however, that Gotanda's death, "lay me down in a lead-lined box of despair" (361).
The narrator flies back to Hokkaido to see Yumiyoshi. They make love and the narrator is reassured that he has rediscovered reality. All he has to do is "recover the know to to be connected" (386). He has a dream and revisists the Sheep man but the room on the non-existant floor is empty. Despite telling Yumiyoshi not to let go of his hand she does and he watches as she disappears into a wall. He is scared that he has lost her and follows her. When he wakes, she is sitting on the sofa watching him. Undressing, she rejoins him in bed where they make love and he says, "She was warm and smooth, with the weight of someone real... Yumiyoshi was soft as the ticking of time, her breath leaving a warm, damp spot on my ar. Reality" (292-3). During the novel, as the narrator discovers who each of the skeletons represents, he is filled with a sense of dread. Kiki explains, however, that the room and skeletons inside it were all part of him. Ultimately, the narrator is able to make his way out of the labyrinth of his own mind and find himself again in the real world.
