Dance Dance Dance: Haruki Murakami

Product Information

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.” 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.” 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 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. 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.

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. 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. ” We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel. ” Though it often tries to avoid the genre, Novelist as a Vocation will be read by some as a book on the craft of writing, especially by writers who aspire to be like Murakami. That’s a risky proposition, as Murakami is among the more sui generis of contemporary writers. His readers might recognize his signature touches—affectless narration, illogical plot turns, strangely dispassionate sexual encounters, all brought to life via a suite of signifiers with an unarticulated personal meaning, such as the many references to music, baseball, cats, cooking, and so on—but they belong to Murakami. (That said, the English novelist David Mitchell’s Number9Dream comes thrillingly close to Murakami, maybe the most successful work of literary fan fiction ever published.) 8But 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 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. 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. 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.

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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. 17The 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. I first noticed this when I read Killing Commendatore for the first time, and subsequently 1Q84, but there is a weird fixation on sexualizing minors (Mariye, Fuka-Eri , and now Yuki in Dance Dance Dance)

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 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."

Need Help?

Nothing," I said. "Just think about what comes before words. You owe that to the dead. As time goes on, you'll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn't, doesn't. Time solves most things. And what time can't solve, you have to solve yourself. Is that too much to ask?" 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.” 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.