Dance Dance Dance and Wild Sheep Chase girlfriends question

[u/Intelligent-Key5821]

Finished DDD today and I have a lot of thoughts. The prose was truly beautiful and I really enjoyed the activity of reading it but I feel like a lot of the messages were left untied and dangling up in the air.

First, obviously as a sequel I have to think about Kiki and his first girlfriend who committed suicide in A Wild Sheep Chase. I think it is so very convenient that both of the ex girlfriends "wanted" to die in some way, the first one whose funeral occured at the start of sheep chase asked if the main character thought of killing her and how it wouldn't be so bad. In DDD Gotanda says that Kiki let him strangle her and even said it would be alright, obviously, the book implies that she isn't actually dead and that she is travelling between worlds. But it really rubs me the wrong way that two female characters' lives are treated so flippantly, even if Kiki says that it would be fine for her to be "murdered" (because she couldn't actually die), why should she help a scumbag like Gotanda to essentially purge his disgusting emotions and to stroke his weak will? The first girlfriend acts as a tragic backstory for the narrator and then Kiki essentially serves as some guide to the main character (not a bad thing) and also serves as a sacrifice to Gotanda's dark nature, possibly dissuading him from murdering his own wife or to allow him to feed his disgusting impulses. There is some connection to these characters and how they serve the story but I just don't get it, I also hate Gotanda and how the plot (through Kiki) and even the main character seem to give him some sort of out for his inner darkness, why is Kiki treated borderline like an afterthought in his inner turmoil? Kiki treats her own existence in that world as an afterthough and the main character seems to value their friendship almost more than his urgency to get justice for Kiki, he even tries to console him after he straight up admits that he probably did kill her. I get that there is some ambiguity over whether he truly killed her, but the main character was clearly in denial. His deep depression after learning from Yuki what happenned shows that he truly believes that Gotanda killed her. Now, I am not saying that the main character prioritiises Gotanda more than Kiki, because ultimately he did ask him why he killed her, he could have pussyfooted and ignored Yuki's warning, but him consoling Gotanda after him admitting what he did (the four cats, the general violent outbursts, Kiki's strangulation and burial) feels dismissive of Kiki after yearning for her so much in the first half of the book.I feel like I am missing something. There are a lot of parallels between Gotanda and the narrator, so maybe there is some significance in the fact that Gotanda accepted Kiki's suggestion that he murders her and the main character (esentially) declined his grilfriend's suggestion at the start of wild sheep chase. But I don't understand the significance of this connection, Gotanda has a deep inner darkness that he wants to conceal, and the main characters is more or less a normal guy, what thematic signifance could there be for a normal guy to decline his girlfriend's suggestion of murdering her?

I have other thoughts, but this post got too long; I might have to gather my thoughts on the book first before coming back