Published: 1994 (Kodansha)
Setting: Tokyo, Hokkaido, Honolulu, Hakone
Summary: In the fourth and final installment of the “Trilogy of the Rat”, Murakami answers the question, what happens after you lose everything? He answers this by positing that all you need to do is dance in step with what is going on around you. I, the unnamed narrator, seemed to be doing this in The Wild Sheep Chase. Yet, this book gives I more agency. I is thrown in the pot with a spacy photographer Ame and her punk-chic daughter Yuki, A one-armed poet, an old classmate turned movie star, a hotel attendant and a cadre of high-class escorts that all connect back to his main love interest in A Wild Sheep Chase, Kiki. I is able to connect the puzzle pieces of his life while he dances in and out of Tokyo, and their lives, eventually settling down and accepting his connection to the Dolphin Hotel and his past life.
Our story starts in the Dolphin Hotel. I has gone there one last time to make peace and perhaps find Kiki. All he finds is a clear-cut example of the excesses of capitalism, a swanky establishment that makes the old Dolphin Hotel seem like a shack. I is up to his usual at the hotel, having fever dreams and talking to sheep men and supernatural forces that welcome his as an old friend. He gets chummy with a woman named Yumiyoshi who helps connect him to the sheep man, and throughout the book she helps him check himself, and stay tethered to his dance. After Yumiyoshi helps I he goes back to his lonely Tokyo apartment in search of Kiki. He doesn’t return alone however, as he is asked to escort the secretly precocious Yuki back to her dad, as her mom has suddenly jetted to Katmandu.
I brings Yuki to her father and is asked to be her caretaker. I reluctantly agrees, going along with his dance. I goes to the movies and spots Kiki making love to his old school classmate, Gotanda. I hangs with Gotanda to get information about Kiki, and eventually has an exhilarating night with a call-girl, Mei. The novel isn’t all roses however, as I learns soon after that night with Mei that she was killed. Was it Gotanda? What is his connection to this call-girl service? These questions are answered later in the novel. I, for the most part, takes the news in stride and Gotanda and I embark on a budding friendship. I is interrogated by the police in connection to Mei’s murder, but he doesn’t seem to connect Gotanda to Kiki and Mei as two call-girls who have disappeared after meeting him. That’s life I guess, don’t question things and move forward?
Our wandering protagonist ends up in Honolulu, where Yuki is to be reunited with her mother Ame, and her boyfriend of the moment, Dick North. I stays there longer than intended, and gets closer to the whole family. Before he leaves for Japan, I spots Kiki in a shopping district. I franticly chases after her, stopping in a hotel room filled with six skeletons, those who have died and will die during the journey of the trilogy. Death seems to follow I wherever he goes, but he keeps on dancing. He doesn’t find Kiki, but he finds the evidence he needs to start piecing Mei’s death together.
In Tokyo, I swiftly moves from meeting Gotanda to meeting Yuki again like before. This time, I takes Yuki to see Gotanda’s movie and she has a vision of Gotanda killing Kiki. I drops Yuki off with her mom in Hakone, and then confronts Gotanda who casually admits that he killed Kiki before killing himself the next day. Now I is left with two people in his life, Yuki and Yumiyoshi. Dick North, the Rat, Mei, Kiki, and Gotanda have all passed and I is dancing a slower and more defeated step. He makes a final trek up to Hokkaido to lick his wounds at the Dolphin Hotel. Yumiyoshi, for the first time in his life, stays around for him and comforts him. They consummate their prolonged prologue, and start a new story left unwritten and unbound by the skeletons in the Honolulu hotel room.
Quote of the book: “For three and a half years, I’d been making this kind of contribution to society. Shoveling snow. You know, cultural snow.”
Favorite character: Yuki, her cold demeanor masks a soft inside that is yearning for affection and a strong parental figure. This character archetype seems old-hat, but Yuki is equal parts earnest and sarcastic. She has the gift of reading others’ pain, in part because she does not feel her own. She helps I move through his dance and becomes perhaps his greatest friend over the four novels. The Rat was always too elusive for I, one of the six people who came in and out of his life in a haphazard fashion. Yuki holds I together through his post-chase blues, and helps him find meaning. I imagine Yuki and I meeting up five years after this novel, having a cup of coffee and a drive around Tokyo Bay before Yuki leaves without a word.
Favorite setting: Honolulu, this is mainly due to the fact that it is a change of pace from the Tokyo and Hokkaido settings of the previous book that are prominent in Dance Dance Dance.
Favorite pop culture reference: Ryuichi Sakumoto, listen to Thousand Knives (1978) and I promise you won’t be disappointed.
Please Stay for: A smooth jazz journey and soothing ending to a profound trilogy+1.
Please Question: The lack of callbacks to the Rat. Perhaps, A Wild Sheep Chase was the end of the line for the Rat’s prominence, but I thought the Rat would loom large as a sort of guide for I. Or perhaps, I would follow the Rat’s trail that he made between the second and third books. Not a big issue, and that is why this book is considered an extended epilogue to the trilogy, but the Rat’s character fell flat after a strong showing in Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973.
Will Reviews Things 