Dance Dance Dance

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, First Person Singular and The City and Its Uncertain Walls Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

"If Raymond Chandler had lived long enough to see Blade Runner, he might have written something like Dance Dance Dance" Observer "An entertaining mix of modern sci-fi, nail-biting suspense and ancient myth...a sometimes funny, sometimes sinister mystery spoof, but like all good postmodern fiction, it also aims at contemporary human concerns, philosophical as well as literary" Chicago Tribune "An entertaining adventure that takes us to the frozen north of Japan, to Hawaii and to the dark, damp corners of the imagination... Reading Dance Dance Dance is a bit like being taken blindfold on a joy-ride" Independent "Mr Murakami writes metaphysical Far Easterns with a Western beat...there are echoes of Raymond Chandler, John Irving and Raymond Carver, but Mr. Murakami's mysterious plots and original characters are very much his own creation" New York Times "Brilliantly combines elements of the surreal, film noir and existentialist enquiry" Sunday Times