Part of The Rat
First published 2002
The narrator is a freelance writer in his thirties, grinding out travel pieces and restaurant copy in Tokyo, when something pulls him back to Sapporo. The hotel he remembers, the Dolphin Hotel, a seedy place where he once stayed with a woman named Kiki, has been demolished and replaced by a gleaming luxury tower. Kiki has vanished. The new hotel stands on the same ground but feels wrong in a way he cannot name. He keeps going back anyway. Inside the hotel he finds a portal to another floor, a place that does not exist on any map, where a figure called the Sheep Man tells him to keep dancing, to keep moving no matter what. Around this instruction he assembles a strange circle of people: Yuki, a thirteen-year-old with psychic gifts who has memorized every Talking Heads lyric; Gotanda, a school friend turned movie star who plays dentists and teachers in forgettable films; a one-armed poet the narrator meets on a beach; high-end call girls whose fees show up on Mastercard statements. People in this circle start dying. The narrator keeps moving. The book is really about what it costs a person to stay functional inside a society that runs on consumption and noise, and whether motion alone can count as a reason to live.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, magical-realism, psychological-thriller, surreal, dark
Vibes: disorienting, haunting, introspective, melancholic, surreal, thought-provoking
Tropes: death-and-loss, found-family, portal-to-another-world, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Tokyo, Sapporo, Dolphin Hotel
Period: Contemporary
393 pages · Paperback · Vintage
Content warnings: death, depression, suicidal-ideation