Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami's unique and addictive fictional universe. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year.

One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game.

I read somewhere that the first thing you should do when you finish reading a Murakami novel is to start it again, and on second listening, Dance Dance Dance delivers up a wealth of detail, the significance of which was lost on me first time around.In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. All these (and more - but avoiding spoilers) woven into a compelling narrative. Several familiar themes appear - a nameless first-person narrating protagonist who is a divorced man in his 30s, a precocious teenaged-girl, beautiful but mysterious women, intense darkness, trans-muralisation - oh and a dead cat makes a brief appearance too. Murakami's genius is to make the extraordinary seem commonplace. If you've enjoyed any of Murakami's other books, Dance Dance Dance will not disappoint, and if you haven't read/listened to any of his other books, this is as good a place to start as any. Each character is distinctly voiced and immediately recognised whenever they appear.

Rupert Degas' voice acting is superb, and frankly with the number of speaking characters in a Murakami book, anything less than superb would not deliver the convincing portrayals that Mr Degas does. What about Rupert Degas’s performance did you like? Brilliant - a Murakami 'Masterpiece of weirdness'

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