So, apparently Dance, Dance, Dance could be thought of as the fourth installment of Haruki's first novel series. I know that Hear the Wind Sing was used as inspiration, or as the basis for A Wild Sheep Chase, and apparently 1970 Pinball is there too, but I was a little confused of where the symbols and characters had come from when I started reading Dance Dance Dance.
Sometimes I think Murakami is a bit of a one-trick pony, reusing the imagery of other books, the solemn lonewolf character who has strangely attractive girls fascinated by him (in this case, a 13-year-old music-loving girl), but sometimes I'll reach a paragraph, take a step back and look inside, and really marvel at how he brings his worlds to life. He can focus on a smell, a stray thought, a mundane task - always bringing them back somehow to the story or the character's development.
As risqué as it is, the friendship with the 13-year-old girl, Yuki, is probably the most beautiful aspect of this story. As with all Murakami's enticing females, there is a melancholy about her that can never be accessed directly as she simultaneously accepts the adult world and clutches to her innocence. This becomes heaviest when she starts referring to the protagonist in past tense, "You were such a nice guy."
You don't know whether this premonitient (not a word) of someone's death, or the inevitable disentanglement of their lives. At some point, the protagonist must start taking life seriously and stop driving around with 13-year-olds, while Yuki must at some point enter the real world as a young woman.
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