SOURCE: “The Long Sayonara,” in Washington Post Book World, Vol. 24, No. 3, January 16, 1994, pp. 1, 11.

In the following review, Ward describes the plot of Dance, Dance, Dance, detailing the novel's settings and characters.

Don't read Haruki Murakami if you want Japanese exotic. His settings—Sapporo, Hakone, Shibuya, Azabu—may exert an initial outlandish charm, but his props—from steak houses and Maseratis to Sam Cooke and Cutty Sark—are as Western as last week's New Yorker tossed on the coffee table. This is mi casa es su casa with a vengeance: We are all living in the suburbs of a global metropolis in which the discontinuities between East and West have long since dissolved. Romantic Japan is dead and gone, say Murakami's novels; modern, urban, middle-aged Japan looks out the window, feels angst, sees signs of April and thinks … T. S. Eliot and Count Basie.

This probably goes far toward...