[In the following review, Ward describes the plot of Dance, Dance, Dance, detailing the novel's settings and characters.]

Don't read Haruki Murakami if you want Japanese exotic. His settings—Sapporo, Hakone, Shibuya, Azabu—may exert an initial outlandish charm, but his props—from steak houses and Maseratis to Sam Cooke and Cutty Sark—are as Western as last week's New Yorker tossed on the coffee table. This is mi casa es su casa with a vengeance: We are all living in the suburbs of a global metropolis in which the discontinuities between East and West have long since dissolved. Romantic Japan is dead and gone, say Murakami's novels; modern, urban, middle-aged Japan looks out the window, feels angst, sees signs of April and thinks … T. S. Eliot and Count Basie.

This probably goes far toward explaining Murakami's breakthrough popularity in the U.S., which is not generally noted for a reciprocal interest in Japanese culture. His first novel to appear in English was A Wild Sheep Chase in 1989, seven years after its publication in Japanese. This eerie, jazzy thriller-cum-ghost story, translated into echt hard-boiled American by Alfred Birnbaum, was an instant critical and even commercial success, and publishers quickly followed up with translations of a second novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and a collection of wildly surrealistic stories entitled The Elephant Vanishes. So popular did these prove that the publishers are scrambling to play catch-up with the prolific Murakami: Dance, Dance, Dance was first published in Japanese in 1988, and Norwegian Wood (1987), which has sold millions of copies in Japan, has yet to be translated.

In the case of Dance, Dance, Dance, it's a game worth playing if you are a fan of A Wild Sheep Chase, a tale that left more ends dangling than a mess of garter snakes. Readers will remember how the world-weary, recently divorced, thirtyish, decent, mediocre protagonist had gotten himself entangled in a perfectly absurd mystery: Where was he to track down the sinister sheep with the star-shaped birthmark that was the key to half the power in contemporary Japan? His search took him and his nameless girlfriend—she of the thrillingly sexy ears—to the northern island of Hokkaido, in whose frigid fastnesses he found the sheep, communed with the dead and lost the girlfriend. By story's end he has returned to Tokyo, like a latterday Ancient Mariner, dazed, saddened, but vaguely wiser, to resume his life “as if,” he says, “I had somewhere to go.”

But, naturally, he can't help wondering what happened to Sexy Ears. What about the old Sheep Man, that mumbling mediator between the living and the dead? And why can't he shake off this feeling that, after all, he still doesn't understand a thing? The old Dolphin Hotel in Sapporo, where so much mystery was set in motion, beckons …

It all comes together, sort of, in Dance, Dance, Dance. Our hero still can't locate his girlfriend—tracing her whereabouts becomes a central strand in the action—but he does discover that her name is Kiki. The ratty old Dolphin has been transmogrified into the glittering, multi-star l'Hotel Dauphin, but the Sheep Man is holed up in it in an odoriferous time-warp on the 16th floor. There are murders and accidental deaths. “Caught in the cross-hair of the real and the imaginary,” our man dauntlessly follows each twisting thread back to where it all began, in Sapporo, “a sump of a city slushed with sunken souls.”

In Sapporo it is the Sheep Man who tells him, somewhat unhelpfully, that the way out of the maze he is in is to “dance. As long as the music plays. You gotta dance.” Before long, he's dancing as fast as he can, always one step behind a plot in which every turn seems to lead him to another corpse.

This fun-fair of the plot is of course what keeps you turning pages, but as in A Wild Sheep Chase it's soon clear that plot is really just an excuse, a framework on which to drape the true reason for being of any Murakami novel: reporting on the parallel waste lands of modern Japan and burgeoning middle age. “So many, I had not thought death had undone so many …” should be this book's motto.

Murakami has a thoroughly theatrical imagination, though, and it's evident that he enjoys setting and peopling his bleak stage. The background is painted deliberately dreary—characters are named Yuki (snow) and Ame (rain), the hero resorts frequently to the image of “shoveling snow” to describe his do-nothing job as an advertising-copy writer, the island of Hokkaido looms like a damp, chill ghost, and the protagonist complains, “My resignation was a silent rain falling over a vast sea.” “You been under the weather?” a friend asks him. “Under,” he replies, “is not the word.”

The foreground is more colorful: Murakami is a master of the scene-clinching detail, and he zooms in unerringly on the passion for things that so befuddles the senses of modern Tokyo. “I tooled the Maserati to the Akasaka condo” (sentences like that are one of the reasons to read Murakami). “At five, I walked to Harajuku and wandered through the teeny-bopper stalls along Takeshita Street … Finally, after visiting several stores, I found what I was looking for: a badge that read ELVIS THE KING. Then to Tsuruoka's for tempura and beer …” In the neon-lit swirl of sensation, aimlessness is all: After a movie, “the end credits came on and I left the theater, hardly having any grasp of the plot. I walked, stepped into a bar, and had a couple vodka gimlets.”

By this point the reader, hardly having any grasp of the plot either, may feel like a couple of vodka gimlets himself. But it's impossible not to stick with it, not because one particularly cares about death's dream waiting-room in Honolulu or the smoke-and-mirror business on the 16th floor of l'Hotel Dauphin, but because one becomes overwhelmed with anxiety to see whether the hapless hero is going to emerge from his gloom and start developing some sense of direction. He seems such a decent fellow, one would hate to think of him stuck for the rest of his life on the hoary old question, “Was the sickness in here or out there?”

Not to give away any crucial details, it seems fair to divulge that the clouds do lift some, and the skeletons do rattle back into the darkness. Plot-ends are tied off, and an improbable new romance puts out buds. Murakami isn't one to make any hollow promises, though. “Outside it was sunny,” the protagonist observes near the novel's end. “Summer coming on. If only the rainy season could be put on hold.”

I don't know. In truth, this slushbound saga of spiritual desolation is so entertaining, maybe sunshine would seem dull by comparison. Pass the vodka.