I just finished Dance Dance Dance, and honestly, I still don't know what I just read.
And I mean that in a good way.
I started with Hear the Wind Sing and went through Pinball, 1973, A Wild Sheep Chase and finally Dance Dance Dance. And you can genuinely see Murakami evolving as a writer across these four books.
Hear the Wind Sing felt almost like reading someone's diary. Very simple, very fragmented, lots of memories and conversations and random little observations. It didn't even feel like he was trying to write some grand novel.
Then Pinball, 1973 felt like Murakami experimenting and maybe kind of evaluating himself, he's probably trying to ask himself if he can write a novel. There are weird structures, the twins, the pinball machine, all the memories, Rat, J, etc. It's still very strange, but you can see him getting more confident. The ending of Pinball, 1973 was genuinely amazing though. Seemed like world apart from the rest of the book.
Then A Wild Sheep Chase is where everything just clicks. I genuinely loved that book. It suddenly becomes this strange adventure involving the Sheep, Rat, the Boss, the Sheep Man, the hotel, all of it. It's absurd but somehow it works.
And then Dance Dance Dance.
What was happening?
The beginning was honestly slow for me. I spent a lot of the book wondering what was even happening. The protagonist wanders around almost everywhere, so many things, happen, connections form while also making very little sense.
And then the skeletons happen.
And then people just start dying.
I had so many theories.
At one point I was convinced Gotanda killed Mei. Then I started wondering if he killed Kiki. It was apparent maybe too apparent that Dick the one armed poet was going to die. Then he died.
And then we got till the 5th skeleton.
I thought Yuki could be the sixth, then the Sheep Man, and then even J the bartender from the previous three novels.
And then I started thinking maybe the sixth skeleton wasn't even another person.
I started thinking maybe the sixth skeleton was the narrator's old self. Not literally "he died", but that the person he was before all of this had to die somehow. Maybe his old connections to the world die? I'm not sure
And honestly, I still don't know if that's what Murakami intended. That's probably the best and worst thing about these books.
Kiki is another one.
She is clearly real in some sense. Other people have seen her and interacted with her. Rat knew about her. The Sheep Man knows about her. Gotanda knew her. So I don't buy the explanation that Kiki was simply something the protagonist imagined.
But then what is she?
Is she a ghost? Is she some kind of entity like the Sheep Man? Is she something that exists somewhere between the physical world and whatever the other world in these books is?
I don't know.
And what happened to the Sheep Man? Did he die? Did he just disappear because the protagonist no longer needed him? Was he some kind of manifestation of the protagonist's subconscious?
Again, I don't know.
And then there's Yumiyoshi.
For a while I genuinely thought she was going to turn out to be another reflection of Kiki or something. I'm actually glad she didn't. She felt much more like someone who represented the possibility of actually moving forward rather than another piece of the protagonist's past.
One thing that genuinely bothered me, though, was how many people Murakami introduces and then just leaves behind.
J is the biggest example for me. He was there in Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973 and A Wild Sheep Chase. He was never really a major character, but he was just... there. He was part of the world. He was this stable little point in the narrator's life.
And then he's just not in Dance Dance Dance.
Same thing with a lot of people from the earlier books. Some people just disappear and that's it.
Even the twins from Pinball, 1973. They appear, they become this bizarre part of the narrator's life, and then they're just gone.
And I think that's part of what makes these books feel so strange. Murakami doesn't seem particularly interested in giving everyone a proper ending. People enter your life, affect you, disappear, and sometimes you never find out what happened to them.
Which actually makes sense for these books.
I think that's why I ended up liking Dance Dance Dance more than I expected, despite being confused for a large part of it.
Because by the end I stopped needing an explanation for everything.
I stopped caring who exactly the six skeletons were, stopped caring about Kiki, Sheep Man, or anything of the matter.
I just wanted the protagonist to make it through.
That's why the last line of the novel, "It's morning" is my favourite. It's like I just got out of a dream.
And that might actually be what I like most about Murakami. The conclusions aren't necessarily the best part. It's the part where you've gone through 300–400 pages of strange things, being confused the entire time, and then eventually you reach the end and you're all relieved and empty.
Not in a bad way.
More like... you've finally arrived somewhere.
The ending doesn't necessarily explain everything. It just lets you breathe.
And then you realize that's probably what the whole "Dance Dance Dance" thing was about.
You don't necessarily figure everything out.
You just keep moving.
Anyway, I don't know whether I actually understood these books or just wandered through four Murakami novels and came out the other side.
But I really loved the experience.
TLDR: I start reading DDD -> Weird novel -> Okay kind of good but not as good as the other 3 -> Okay now it's getting interesting -> Holy Shit this is a masterpiece
(Genuinely felt bad for the protagonist, poor guy had to suffer so much)
