Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance

Haruki Murakami is a literary idol of mine. His blend of the everyday and the fantastic, metaphysical/philosophical meditation and genre writing, enchants me. I am an enormous fan of his. I have recently finished reading two of his novels, The Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance.

I now try to avoid reading books by the same author back-to-back like that, because I have found from experience that if I do read too much of one author's works consecutively, I tend to conflate the storylines and confuse myself about what happened in which book. This time, however, I permitted myself to do so because the books are related.

The Wild Sheep Chase is the Chandler-esque story of an average guy narrator who is hired by a rich and mysterious business-man, or rather his ice-cool secretary, to find a specific sheep that was in a photograph sent to the narrator by an old friend, The Rat. This leads to a strange run-in with the Sheep Professor, a man obsessed with sheep, and an even more strange encounter with the Sheep Man, a man wearing a sheep costume who may have a connection to the spiritual world.

Dance Dance Dance is a sequel to The Wild Sheep Chase. The unnamed protagonist narrator (who, I have picked up from elsewhere is actually named Boku) is the same, but the besides the cameo appearance of the Sheep Man from the first book, the second book has all new characters. A character from the first book, Kiki (unnamed until the second book), has gone missing, and Boku spends the sequel trying to track her down. In the meantime, he returns to the Dolphin Hotel. In The Wild Sheep Chase, the Dolphin Hotel was a decrepit, dusty hotel that was the home of the Sheep Professor. In Dance Dance Dance it has become a skyscraping luxury hotel. Boku meets a new cast of strange and bizarre characters and becomes involved in the police investigation of a murdered prostitute that he slept with.

I found Dance Dance Dance more satisfying than The Wild Sheep Chase. Although neither resolves all their mysteries in an entirely neat way, I actually don't mind. The ambiguity of the endings is one of the charms of a Murakami book. If you want everything tied up neatly, read an Agatha Christie. With Murakami, the journey is more pleasurable than the destination (if, indeed, you ever in fact reach a destination).