Dance, dance, dance

The thirty-four-year old anonymous narrator writes texts for various clients and calls this endeavour snow shovelling. It is boring work, but someone has to do it. His life turns into a new direction, when in his dream he relives the events from years ago, when he was living in hotel Dolphin with a prostitute, called Kiki. Following the call from the world of dreams, he takes a vacation and travels outside Tokyo, but in Sapporo a surprise awaits him. In the place of the old hotel a new one is standing with the same name. He comes close to the receptionist Yumiyoshi, with whom more than just mutual attraction bonds him. Both have the ability to enter a parallel world in which the old Dolphin hotel stands and in it the Sheep-man. The words of this creature are written in continuo. Among other things the creature says everything is connected and that the narrator should dance. When he returns to Tokyo the narrator becomes the occasional caretaker of the thirteen-year-old Yuki, who comes from a dysfunctional family and has a gift of clairvoyance. All the time the narrator is driven by the question, where to did Kiki disappear. He even gets involved into a murder investigation. In the end he leaves Tokyo and the false glamour of his former classmate and the famous actor Gotanda and returns to Sapporo, where Yumiyoshi awaits him. There are plenty of song titles and names of musicians from the world of popular music in the novel. (RN)