Appreciating an attractive middle-aged woman is one of the great luxuries in life.

She was truly a beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all.
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

Sometimes when I’m with you. I remember the things I lost when I was your age. Like I remember the sound of the rain and the smell of the wind. And it’s really a gift, getting those things back.
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

Murakami is an acquired taste. I know that. I’ve known that for the twenty years I’ve been reading his books. Somehow, my mind only recalls the bizarre and interesting bits and skips the truly dull sections.

Except in the case of 1Q84. God, that book was awful.

In Dance Dance Dance, the unnamed narrator is trapped in a months-long self-exile pity party years after his girlfriend vanished. He’s tried to move on. He makes good money as a writer. Even though he takes unchallenging jobs of writing magazine features for lifestyle magazines or copy for toothpaste ads, these jobs pay the bills and leave him with ample time to kill. He’s an easy-going guy, at least he thinks he is. Now, he can’t get his ex, Kiki, out of his head. She disappeared after joining him on a trip to Sapporo to find his old friend ‘The Rat’, who went missing under mysterious circumstances. While in Sapporo, the narrator experienced mysterious supernatural events of his own, and he’s never recovered. All of this is covered in the first book, A Wild Sheep Chase.

He returns to Sapporo to try to make sense of it all and to find a way to move on. When he arrives, the Dolphin Hotel, the creepy, run down hotel where he last saw Kiki, has been replaced by a sleek and modern glass-and-steel hotel. It is still The Dolphin, but nothing of the original hotel, or its strange proprietor, remains.

When the narrator asks questions about what happened to the original hotel, he is pulled into a mystery that is more personal and more convoluted than his initial search for his missing beloved.

This is a weird story, but it is one of Murakami’s more digestible novels. I still love the chapters describing his time exploring Sapporo and getting caught up in the mystery of Kiki, the hotel, his old classmate-turned-matinee-idol Gotanda, and Yuki, the angry, abandoned thirteen-year-old girl he befriends. I love the world of The Sheep Man, and the chapters where the narrator is summoned to his alternate reality are my favorite chapters in all of Murakami’s books.

However, this does not make up for the majority of the story, which takes place in Tokyo and involves the narrator’s storyline with Gotanda and the mystery of the missing call girls.

This is the third time I’ve read this book and honestly, maybe my mind was wiped or the brilliant chapters I described earlier completely overwrote my memories of the dull, non-supernatural storylines. It also overwrote how truly awful the female characters are portrayed in this book. With the exception of the thirteen-year-old and her family, the narrator sleeps with nearly all of the other women he encounters. Toward the end of the story, I expected yet another prostitute to show up to provide the final clue needed for the narrator to solve the mystery, but only after he slept with her.

I’m giving this three stars because even though the momentum and content of the story drags, the first half of the book almost makes the second half worth it.