Dance Dance Dance: Haruki Murakami

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I’m deep in my revisiting/reading for the first time of Murakami’s catalogue, and I keep hitting up against something in revisiting my favorites that I either glossed over or just chose to ignore the first time through, and it’s bugging me.

Combine this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose and out comes Dance Dance Dance. 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.

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But there is another reason to not read Novelist as a Vocation as a craft book: Writing fiction can’t be reduced to steps, and even if one rejects the notion of it as a divine calling, I agree with Murakami that “there is something else that is needed”—something unnameable and impossible to find in a how-to. Perhaps for this reason, Murakami is more interested in why he writes than how others might do so. In the chapter “So What Should I Write About?,” he tells us how he arrived at his particular style: 9 I wrote as if I were performing a piece of music. Jazz was my main inspiration. As you know, the most important aspect of a jazz performance is rhythm. You have to sustain a solid rhythm from start to finish—when you fail, people stop listening. The next most important element is the chords, or harmony if you like…. There are so many kinds. Though everyone is using a piano with the same eighty-eight keys, the sound varies to an amazing degree depending on who’s playing. This says something important about novel writing as well. The possibilities are limitless—or virtually limitless—even if we use the same limited material. 10 When the narrator confronts Gotanda, the actor says it is probably true that he killed Kiki but he cannot remember. He says that all his life he has been compelled to do terrible things like hurting people and killing animals. He doesn’t know if he killed Kiki, but suggests he probably did. The narrator seems less convinced, but when he goes to get them both a beer, Gotanda drives off and kills himself by crashing the car into Tokyo Bay.

By chance, the narrator goes to a cinema to use the restroom, then watches a movie starring his high-school classmate, Ryoichi Gotanda. In one scene, the narrator’s ex-girlfriend, Kiki, appears. He watches the movie several more times, pondering the coincidence and how it relates to the Sheep Man’s claim of connecting things.

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Dance Dance Dance begins four and a half years after the events depicted in A Wild Sheep Chase. The narrator briefly reminds the reader of that story, which saw his girlfriend disappear after they had stayed at a run-down hotel in Hokkaido called the Dolphin. He then explains that he has become a successful writer, but that he is deeply unsatisfied by the work. His life has also been filled with various personal problems, from divorce to the death of his cat. Possibilities are like cancer. The more I think about them, the more they multiply, and there's no way to stop them. I'm out of control. ” The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.” If Raymond Chandler had lived long enough to see Blade Runner, he might have written something like Dance Dance Dance Observer 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 possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.”

In another essay in the book, Murakami explains how he conveys this sense of limitless possibility. For one thing, he tells us, he works without an outline—“not knowing how it will unfold or end, letting things take their course and improvising as I go along. This is by far the most fun way to write.” Thinking about Murakami’s novels as improvisations around a theme is clarifying; so too is thinking about the writer as motivated, above all else, to keep the reader “listening.” 11 For Murakami, art is not always about art, though it is about discipline. This commitment to productivity is an essential part of the novelist’s job. More is required, of course—but when it comes to defining that “more,” Murakami becomes even more elliptical and elusive: “Essentially, I believe people don’t write novels because someone asks them to. They write because they have a personal desire to write. And it’s this strong inner motivation that drives them to write, and to endure all their own struggles as they do.” 15 A receptionist approaches him after he inquires about the previous incarnation of the Dolphin, telling him that she has had a supernatural experience and is curious about what the hotel used to be like. In great detail, she tells him that she got in the staff elevator but that it stopped at a non-existent floor, where she was temporarily trapped in a cold, dark, damp-smelling hallway. Something that “wasn’t human” moved towards her but she managed to escape. 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.” When he is released with the help of Yuki, who has called her father for legal assistance, the narrator goes to meet the girl and she tells him that she has psychic powers, which is how she knew of the Sheep Man. Her father offers him a job looking after Yuki, but he refuses, saying that he doesn’t want money and will only see the girl when he chooses.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." When he tries to reach the mysterious hidden floor, the narrator fails, but later, when he is not paying attention, the elevator dumps him there. In the darkness, he runs into the Sheep Man, a tiny, wool-clad supernatural being from A Wild Sheep Chase. He claims to have been waiting here for the narrator but won’t say why. He says that his job is to connect things and tells the narrator “Yougottadance.” (In the English translation, the Sheep Man’s words run together without spacing and only minimal punctuation.) The two converse but the Sheep Man’s answers are extremely cryptic and the narrator learns little except that this other world is not the land of the dead. 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. Now, let me just say that Murakami is one of my all time favorite writers, and I’m in no way implying he’s a pedophile or any of these outlandish things you see thrown around from time to time, but I do want to understand.

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami 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.

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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. The supernatural character known as the Sheep Man speaks differently between the two versions. The character speaks normal Japanese in the original work, but in the English translations, his speech is written without any spaces between words. Written Japanese does not typically demarcate words with spaces.