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I own pretty much everything Murakami has ever written, including his non-fiction, and while I enjoy them all, Dance Dance Dance might be my favorite. I also never see anyone recommend it, which seems odd to me. An old hotel elevator that opens to a void where the Sheep Man waits for you. It's utterly bizarre. I love it.

Norwegian Wood is also very good, but it doesn't have my favorite trait of Murakami's other writing: the easy surreality of it. An unseen world pushes into the world of his characters, and they underreact. In terms of overall concerns, the Sheep Man is as pressing as a date with an attractive woman.

In a similar vein, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders is both lightly funny and surreal. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami reminded me a bit of the meloncholy of Norwegian Wood. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster is also very reminiscent of Murakami.

It's worth warning that Dance Dance Dance is a sequel to his Rat trilogy (which ends with A Wild Sheep Chase, which for many years was the only in the trilogy available in English). It makes references to characters and events in those books.

Personally, I read it after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is his masterpiece. Compared to WUBC, Dance feels like a unfinished dress rehearsal by a middle-schooler. Dance is full of ideas, but never builds a cohesive universe. There are killers and shared dreams and/alternate universes and so on, but none of it adds up to a very satisfying whole. WUBC, on the other hand, actually constructs, in quite masterly fashion, a mythology. Murakami is able to hold himself back and keep things mysterious, but the mysteries don't seem random, and the drama around to unravel them unfolds organically. It feels like a very carefully planned novel, unlike some of his other ramshackle plots. And the dream magic isn't there for weirdness; it actually serves a very important narrative point, one that leads to plot resolution and real catharsis, and the magical aspects don't seem so magical as David Lynchian, like something out of Twin Peaks (especially the revival series!). Some of his books, including Dance, seem full of intentional weirdness where Murakami is throwing everything at the wall to see if it would stick, but everything in WUBC just works.

Haruki Murakami's novel 'Dance Dance Dance' has a character who is in a similar situation. He's a movie star who because of circumstances related to his divorce has acquired a stunning amount of debt. So most of his income goes into covering this debt. He is very bad with numbers and money, this character, and so he cannot ever figure out how much he owes and how long will the situation last.

However his movie studio rents him a high-class apartment, gets him cool cars to drive, covers various bills from shops and restaurants and whatnot as 'the entertainment expenses', can send him on the high-profile vacations, etc. They can even get him the expensive escorts, because absolutely anything can be worded to fall under the umbrella of the 'enterntainment expenses'. So in short, he can 'have' anything as long as he does not actually own it.

In the end this character kills himself, due largely to the inability to exert agency over his life. And that if you read the book in the face-value 'no-mystical' mode, otherwise the outcome is rather worse.

So to answer your question, going into the infinite debt for infinite reward does not really sound attractive.

The only Murakami novel that has the author lose a cat, his wife and encounter "something magical that is somehow related to the Manchuria war" is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I can only assume you read it twice by mistake.

Several of his novels do feature a man with a cat, and several novels feature distant women. But if I remember correctly, the only other married narrator is the protagonist in South of the Border, West of the Sun, and there is a character in 1Q84 who is married and divorced.

To say that the plots of any of his books have exactly the same plot would be a huge mischaracterization, though. The only two books that are even vaguely similar are Wind-Up and the earlier Dance Dance Dance (the last part of a quadrilogy about the "Sheep Man"); the latter feels a lot like a preliminary sketch for the vastly superior Wind-Up, in particular the fascination about hotel rooms and shared dreams. But the plots are completely different.

I haven't read that particular one, but probably have it in a bookshelf somewhere. My wife is a big Murakami fan and I've read almost all of them. I will make that the next one on my fiction reading list, thanks!

I particularly enjoyed A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, whereas my wife loves Kafka on the Shore (which I didn't like). Funny that...

Long time Murakami fun here, have read all his books and recently re-read the Rat Trilogy (Wild Sing + Pinball, A Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance). I agree that there is indeed repetitiveness in his most recent work but I still find a lot of his work insightful and somewhat relatable. One of the best imo ranking of his work can be found in [0].
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/murakami/comments/3q28p4/to_those_w...