How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Excellent
Advantages:
Absolutely original, enthralling if it's your style .
Disadvantages:
Something of an acquired taste .
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
This is one of the first Murakami books I read. Technically, I believe it's as a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, but having read them the wrong way round, I don't feel I suffered too greatly!
I absolutely adore Murakami's works, though they vary slightly in readability. He's a rather complicated author, doesn't necessarily conform to simple things we might take for granted in a novel, like, say, explaining things, or wrapping up loose ends, but if it's the actual reading of something that you enjoy, a way with words and twists and turns that you could never, ever hope to predict, Murakami is my highest recommendation.
This edition is a good translation as well - some of them are slightly...clunky, but this flows perfectly, and I don't think there's too much missing from the sense of the original Japanese, judging by some of the discussions I've had on journal groups and so on.
But, to the actual story. A man - the typical central Murakami character, 'Boku', the Japanese-everyman - finds himself driven to return to a hotel he visited once before. On his arrival, everything is different. And almost instantly, things take a turn for the bizarre; apparently, the sixteenth floor occasionally turns into a long, dark corridor. Eventually, Boku finds himself in that very corridor, and discovers The Sheep Man. What follows is a long and complex tale involving a thirteen-year-old girl named Yuki, a porn star, Kiki, a trip to Hawaii, and a thousand twists and turns.
If you like something neat and tidy, quick, easy reading, absolute resolutions and driving plot, this maybe isn't the best thing for you; if you were interested in Murakami all the same, I'd recommend either one of his collections of short stories, or the most commerically succesful of his works, Norweigan Wood. If however you don't mind being led around a Japanese garden path, and being told stories about women with truly beautiful ears, then you could do so very much worse than pick this up.
Personally, I much prefer Dance, Dance, Dance to a number of his other works, it perfectly exemplifies his ability to create a world that's just a little to the left of the one we know and understand, where everything is much more believable than we might necessarily like it to be. I've reread it a number of times, and the sheer pleasure of his writing style always has me captivated.
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