Dance Dance Dance
 |
| Vintage |
Haruki Murakami
1988 (Japanese)/ 1994 (English)
Translated by Jay Rubin
Translated by Jay Rubin
Other Murakami Reviews- A Wild Sheep Chase - Dance Dance Dance - Underground - Sputnik Sweetheart - after the quake - After Dark - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - 1Q84- Books I & II - Book III - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Strange Library
“Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.”
In a somewhat morbid realisation of life being too short, I recently decided to stop spacing out as-yet unread novels by my absolute favourite authors, hence more Charles Bukowski and Paul Auster reviews recently. The daddy of them all in this regard was Dance Dance Dance, the last unread book available from Haruki Murakami, which I'd been saving on my to-read pile for a long time. It was kind of like my own tribute to Desmond Hume from Lost, the man trapped in an underground bunker on a really weird island who saved his copy of Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend so it can be the last thing he ever reads before he dies. I wasn't going to take it that far, but I liked the idea of having that one book by (probably) my favourite author left over to constantly look forward to.
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But then he wrote Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Jay Rubin translated it to English, and it's scheduled to turn up on my doorstep sometime around mid-August. So, after taking a short reading break following Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions, I began to read Dance Dance Dance, albeit not without a sense of apprehension. Written in an early stage of Murakami's superstar novelist career, it sits nicely in his bibliography nestled between Norwegian Wood (the novel that gave him national fame) and the novella South of the Border, West of the Sun (one of my personal favourites)- all of which sounded great, until I saw that it was a sequel to his earlier work The Trilogy of the Rat. Of those three books I haven't read the first two because they haven't been printed in English aside from an early limited run (second-hand copies of which go for annoyingly high prices on the 'net, and I haven't given in to temptation yet), and the third is A Wild Sheep Chase.
As my hasty review of it showed, I didn't really get on with that book. The prose style and characterisations were fine, though naturally not as well-mastered as later novels, but most importantly the use of magical realism (or postmodernism or surrealism or whatever you want to call it) felt too poorly controlled in its portrayal of what was actually going on. Murakami can write labyrinthine stories, yes, but on this one occasion I wasn't spellbound. The thought of returning to that style or similar was disheartening.
The nameless narrating lead character returns, not surprisingly, still blunt, not particularly friendly, and full of hard-boiled dialogue; this time, I found, with a more pronounced sense of fatigue. Straight away I knew there was a much greater chance of me enjoying this book, as the author's voice and style seemed so much more well defined and evocative. Though A Wild Sheep Chase was described as a postmodern detective story, I felt the latter aspect dominated the former to such an extent it became irrelevent, but Dance Dance Dance readdresses that balance through the superb narration; there's plenty of pulp detective fiction embedded, of the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. As Murakami begins to lay the story out things become even clearer; while returning characters and some references to prior events in The Trilogy of the Rat do exist, the reader doesn't need to be aware of them (or in awe of them) to make the book work whatsoever, as instead they sit back comfortably after initially helping to set the scene.
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The plot revolves around the narrator's unwavering need to return to the mysterious Dolphin Hotel, to confront and understand the horror-like past memories it once left him with. When he does return, he finds the hotel rebuilt and restaffed, superficially seeming completely normal but retaining the ethereal sense of dread, an aura like the Overlook Hotel of King's The Shining (and you know when I say King I really mean Kubrick). While vaguely investigating, the narrator comes across a new set of important characters, some of whom link him again to his past, some of whom change his life very unexpectedly; like Yuri, a neglected 13-year-old daughter to rich parents, whom the narrator befriends and takes care of in a unique relationship that was the highlight of the book for me, such is Murakami's brilliant way of transposing two different characters across each other to create a relationship that almost feels real.
The thematic bulk of the book turned out to be something I absolutely loved, in that it was preaching to the choir by presenting a well-structured post-modern detective story, where, without giving too much away, Murakami focuses on the mysterious nature of unexplained connections between people and places as his character investigates a possible murder mystery. In actual fact it's probably a much more straightforward book than his other longer novels (Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle spring immediately to mind as far more complicated structurally), which somewhat limits its full potential, compared to later Murakami novels, but allows it to more fully embrace the notion of twisted genre fiction. It continues this way mostly to the end, which is again a lot clearer than other Murakami and provides somewhat of a happy send-off to his narrator or four books. I was pleasantly surprised by the ending and it added to my enjoyment overall, concluding the novel as a strong example of the author balancing his experimental nature with his control over the story. As his writing developed in the years to come he was able to more fully engage his experiments without damaging the narrative, and this book felt like an important stage in that development.
And so, unless I can quickly find copies of Murakami's first two novels for a reasonable price (ie less than a hundred pounds) I'm currently caught up on his available bibliography, around six years after I started. I can't wait for his next book to come out, I'm going to gush over it until I make everyone who reads this blog sick.
The nameless narrating lead character returns, not surprisingly, still blunt, not particularly friendly, and full of hard-boiled dialogue; this time, I found, with a more pronounced sense of fatigue. Straight away I knew there was a much greater chance of me enjoying this book, as the author's voice and style seemed so much more well defined and evocative. Though A Wild Sheep Chase was described as a postmodern detective story, I felt the latter aspect dominated the former to such an extent it became irrelevent, but Dance Dance Dance readdresses that balance through the superb narration; there's plenty of pulp detective fiction embedded, of the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. As Murakami begins to lay the story out things become even clearer; while returning characters and some references to prior events in The Trilogy of the Rat do exist, the reader doesn't need to be aware of them (or in awe of them) to make the book work whatsoever, as instead they sit back comfortably after initially helping to set the scene.
The plot revolves around the narrator's unwavering need to return to the mysterious Dolphin Hotel, to confront and understand the horror-like past memories it once left him with. When he does return, he finds the hotel rebuilt and restaffed, superficially seeming completely normal but retaining the ethereal sense of dread, an aura like the Overlook Hotel of King's The Shining (and you know when I say King I really mean Kubrick). While vaguely investigating, the narrator comes across a new set of important characters, some of whom link him again to his past, some of whom change his life very unexpectedly; like Yuri, a neglected 13-year-old daughter to rich parents, whom the narrator befriends and takes care of in a unique relationship that was the highlight of the book for me, such is Murakami's brilliant way of transposing two different characters across each other to create a relationship that almost feels real.The thematic bulk of the book turned out to be something I absolutely loved, in that it was preaching to the choir by presenting a well-structured post-modern detective story, where, without giving too much away, Murakami focuses on the mysterious nature of unexplained connections between people and places as his character investigates a possible murder mystery. In actual fact it's probably a much more straightforward book than his other longer novels (Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle spring immediately to mind as far more complicated structurally), which somewhat limits its full potential, compared to later Murakami novels, but allows it to more fully embrace the notion of twisted genre fiction. It continues this way mostly to the end, which is again a lot clearer than other Murakami and provides somewhat of a happy send-off to his narrator or four books. I was pleasantly surprised by the ending and it added to my enjoyment overall, concluding the novel as a strong example of the author balancing his experimental nature with his control over the story. As his writing developed in the years to come he was able to more fully engage his experiments without damaging the narrative, and this book felt like an important stage in that development.
And so, unless I can quickly find copies of Murakami's first two novels for a reasonable price (ie less than a hundred pounds) I'm currently caught up on his available bibliography, around six years after I started. I can't wait for his next book to come out, I'm going to gush over it until I make everyone who reads this blog sick.
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| The web of Dance Dance Dance |
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