This time last year, Haruki Murakami’s Wild Sheep Chase (first published in Japanese in 1982) helped to guide me around Japan during my research trip to the National Institute of Polar Research. The sheep-man related shadowy industrialist right wing politician figure with connections to the Japanese empire before the Second World War provided me with a model for trying to make sense of Tetsuya Torii, the rich geochemist who led Japanese research in the McMurdo Dry Valleys from the 1960s to the mid 1980s. Of course such a comparison is deeply unfair, and betrays my shallow understanding of Japanese culture. But there was just enough in common for this comparison to make sense to me, and there seemed something Murakami-esque blurring of fantasy and reality about our ‘wild sheep chase’ in search of information about Japanese polar research. With a little imagination, I could make a comparison between the NIPR library in the outskirts of Tokyo and the musty library on all things sheep related hidden in the depths of Sapporo’s Dolphin Hotel. And I even travelled to Hokkaido by bullet train on my own Wild Sheep Chase pilgrimage.
Dance, Dance, Dance is the sequel to Wild Sheep Chase. The sheep-man is still here, hidden on the sixteenth floor of the newly renovated Dolphin hotel. But he seems to have lost his showy right-wing industrialist connections, and is now someone different (I’d need to go back to the ending of Wild Sheep Chase to really think through this identity). There are many similarities between the books and many of the same characters. The 34-year old protagonist is the same person. But the sinister conspiratorial pulling of strings at a national level from the first book is replaced by more of a simple murder mystery. The ‘high class prostitutes’ that the protagonist manages to sleep with almost purely by chance have a habit of disappearing, and in one case is brutally murdered. The main character is brought into the police station for an extended interrogation about her death, but manages to keep silent in defence of his movie-actor friend (who in this case had provided the prostitute). The unlikely relationship between the 34-year old protagonist and a 13-year old girl with special powers of foresight, who he meets in the Dolphin Hotel is central to the story, although it’s a little unclear why. There are, as always with Murakami, lots of seemingly disconnected themes and unresolved plots. But despite a lack of neatness and clear resolution, everything comes together and it another tremendously gripping Murakami novel.
Religion, Environment, History 