Dance Dance Dance: Haruki Murakami

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As a result, some of Novelist as a Vocation can feel pretty silly. There is something absurd in Murakami avowing, “I love the activity of writing novels. Which is why I’m really grateful to be able to make a living doing just that, why I feel it’s a blessing I’ve been able to live this kind of life.” The author barely explores the ways in which he feels blessed, doesn’t even elucidate the kind of life he’s led. He has no particular responsibility to, but it feels to me like a missed opportunity. 17 My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death.” The next day, the narrator is arrested in connection with the murder of the prostitute he slept with at Gotanda’s house. He is rigorously interrogated by police officers that he calls Fisherman and Bookish due to their appearances. The officers know he did not kill her but keep playing mind games with him for three days, certain that he is hiding something. Murakami also comments on Japanese youth, watching junior high-school students wandering in Harajuku streets dressed with high fashion items calling them “clowns” and while he barely stands to look at them, he creates the thirteen-year-old of his dreams, Yuki. Daughter of well-off parents but lonely and almost abandoned, she becomes a loyal comrade of our hero after meeting her in the roof garden of L'Hotel Dauphin listening music through her headphones, drinking orange juice. It wouldn't worth mentioning her, If Murakami as a tribute to Nabokov didn't present her as a nymphet that the protagonist often reminds to himself that if he was 15 years old, he would be a goner for her. Combine this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose and out comes Dance Dance Dance.

Murakami’s style (as rendered in English, anyway) has always been a bit cool and distant. This works well in his novels but does not serve him when the subject he chooses to write about is himself. He’s unable to reach candor and writes about the self as though it’s just another unsolvable mystery. When telling us how Murakami became Murakami, he explains that it was simply a matter of how he spent his time. Each day his goal remained the same: to produce about 1,600 words. “That’s not how an artist should go about his art, some may say. It sounds more like working in a factory. And I concur—that’s not how artists work. But why must a novelist be an artist? Who made that rule? No one, right? So why not write in whatever way is most natural to you?” 14 High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-year-old dropout with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem. I’m only halfway through, but the way the narrator is acting with Yuki almost feels like a grooming relationship. From the “I would date you if I were your age” to opening up to her to telling her about periods, it just feels really off to me and I’m not sure how to reconcile it.

In “Dance Dance Dance”, love is a matter of the unconscious and our hero, in a magical way, spots the mysterious, cute receptionist of L' Hotel Dauphin and falls for her instantly, not only because she is aesthetically pleasing to his eyes but because his fear is her fear (I'm not revealing this so easily). Being courteous and maybe timid, he doesn't force her until later in the book to a completion of their love. Until then, Murakami shows his great knowledge of body psychology and language describing all these little things that people in love notice with each other. A light touch in the bridge of the eyeglasses, a fading tone of voice, folded hands on the table while their faces meet. I doubt that this makes sense to most people. But I think I'm right. People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if posible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies. Personally, I don't buy it."

The narrator agrees to escort Yuki to Hawaii to visit her mother. They stay for two weeks and at the end the narrator thinks he sees Kiki. He stops their rental car, gets out, and chases her. She leads him to the eighth floor of a building and disappears. In the room are six skeletons. In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. 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, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. Usually, I can justify his hypersexualization without much thought, since most of his stories are through the perspective of a lonely, sexually frustrated man. But Dance Dance Dance is bothering me a little more than most. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely.” Apart from Kiki, there are plenty of characters in this story that are going to disappear, and all attached in some way with our hero. Like a detective lost in modern Tokyo in a futuristic film-noir, this guy, once in a while, attempts to figure out the answers to the riddles of the missing people, but for umpteenth time Murakami isn't interested to answer any of them, making only philosophical observations about life and death through the cynic words of his protagonist. Even life and death is part of the capitalistic system in “Dance Dance Dance”, “And you didn't want to die, I know. I'm doing all I can. This is how I live. It's the system. I bite my lip and do what I got to.”In this propulsive novel, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work in any language fuses science fiction, the hard-boiled thriller, and white-hot satire into a new element of the literary periodic table.