Forster's "only connect"-the narrator does, as he befriends Yuki, left in the hotel by her artist mother continues his search for Kiki meets up with a high-school chum and courts Miss Yumiyoshi.
He investigates and meets the old Sheep Man, a son of the original owner "living in hiding from the system,'' who advises him to "dance as long as the music plays." And dance-another variation of E.M. But remnants of the old hotel may survive: a young clerk, Miss Yumiyoshi, relates her late-night encounter with an impenetrable darkness and musty smell on the 16th floor. When an assignment takes him to Sapporo, he decides to stay in the Dolphin-only to find it replaced by a new building. Like most Murakami protagonists, the divorced narrator is a savvy consumer of everything current from music to food, but he's also a realist-a journalist who writes unsigned features and describes his work as "shovelling snow-you do it because somebody's got to, not because it's fun." Emotionally numb, he is increasingly troubled by dreams in which former lover Kiki, who disappeared from the run-down Dolphin Hotel in Sapporo, where they'd been staying, seems to be calling him. Once again, Murakami (Hard-Boiled Wonderland, 1991) limns in meticulous detail the life of an ordinary young man irrevocably changed by a troubling encounter with another world-this time, in a sequel to his debut novel, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989).
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