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Dance Dance Dance: Haruki Murakami

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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. 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. 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 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) 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.

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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. 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. Dance Dance Dance ( ダンス・ダンス・ダンス, Dansu Dansu Dansu) is the sixth novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. First published in 1988, it was translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum in 1994. The book is a sequel to Murakami's novel A Wild Sheep Chase. In 2001, Murakami said that writing Dance Dance Dance had been a healing act after his unexpected fame following the publication of Norwegian Wood and that, because of this, he had enjoyed writing Dance more than any other book. [1] Plot summary [ edit ] 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. 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.

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. 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.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. 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. The narrator decides suddenly to return to Tokyo and is asked to chaperone a thirteen-year-old girl called Yuki, whose mother has forgotten her. There is a blizzard and their flight is delayed. The unlikely pair bond, despite their age difference and the girl’s grumpy disposition. She confesses that she too has seen the Sheep Man.

Confusing! Amazing! Enthralling! I just finished it, and if anyone remembers my last post I also read a wild sheep chase, before of course. Spoilers ahead: 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.

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