DANCE DANCE DANCE By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum. 393 pp. New York: Kodansha International.
The unnamed male narrator of Haruki Murakami's latest book, Dance Dance Dance -- his fourth to be published in this country -- is 34 years old and divorced, drives a used Subaru, works in public relations, eats at McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts, listens to Sam Cooke and idolizes Clint Eastwood. That he is not American but an ordinary citizen of Tokyo confirms much that we already suspected about contemporary urban Japan and shows that Mr. Murakami remains a member of what might be called the "think globally, write locally" school of international fiction.
Dance Dance Dance continues the tale of the cynical but sensitive loner who first appeared in A Wild Sheep Chase (published here in 1989), a book with so great a stylistic debt to Raymond Chandler that one critic renamed it The Big Sheep. In it, the narrator meets a woman with bewitchingly erotic ears who accompanies him to the snowy northern city of Sapporo in pursuit of a supernaturally powerful sheep with a brown star on its back. That novel managed to balance a graceful ethereality with the noir world-weariness of its narrator: Philip Marlowe meets the Floating World. If only Dance Dance Dance were as light on its feet.
It is four years later, and our narrator is back in Tokyo and once again alone, the magnificent-eared woman having disappeared. Yet in his dream the narrator hears her weeping, which troubles him enough to take time off from his meaningless public relations work ("What I did was shovel cultural snow") to try to find her. So off he jets to the setting of his earlier adventures: the decrepit Dolphin Hotel in a seedy section of Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido.
He arrives to find the old structure gone, replaced by a glass-and-steel luxury hotel. The dream-haunting woman never appears, but others claim his attention: a hotel receptionist named Miss Yumiyoshi, a spoiled but neglected teen-ager named Yuki and a charming young prostitute called Mei.
When Mei is found murdered, the plot follows a blueprint -- part detective story, part science fiction -- similar to the one in A Wild Sheep Chase. These characters and others, including Gotanda, a former school chum of the narrator who is now a famous movie star, circle suspiciously around the mystery of Mei's death as the narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with finding her killer.
The hunt takes him back and forth several times from Sapporo to Tokyo, even preoccupying him on a vacation to the foreign shores of Honolulu. When he approaches the murder mystery's core, questions about himself are revealed as well: For whom is the woman in his dreams weeping? What does it mean when his spiritual guide from A Wild Sheep Chase, a disheveled extraterrestrial called the Sheep Man, reappears and tells him to keep dancing "as long as the music plays"?
Some of the novel's best passages are comic: Gotanda's charisma in a junior high school science class was so great that "if he lit a Bunsen burner with those graceful hands of his, it was like the opening ceremonies of the Olympics." Others are poetic: of a twilight walk through Tokyo, the narrator writes, "From the top of the hill, I could see the neon signs coming on as the dark-suited masses of salarymen crossed the intersection like instinct-blinded salmon."
But despite the discrete excellence of such passages and the generally skillful translation of Alfred Birnbaum, the book never quite decides what it wants to be. At times it reaches for the urbane whimsicality of Mr. Murakami's earlier novel, while elsewhere it attempts to be a more serious investigation into the depths of human identity. Knocked off balance by such vacillation, Dance Dance Dance stumbles where it ought to glide.