Dance Dance Dance

Bought this book thinking I had found the Vintage edition paperback covers because that is the picture displayed only to be sent the newest paperback edition. Disappointed.

I know "A Wild Sheep Chase" (WSC) is a revered Murakami book and that "Dance, Dance, Dance" (DDD) is widely regarded as not in the same league as WSC, or the "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" or "Kafka on the Shore" but I thought DDD a much better book than WSC, superior also to "South of the Border, West of the Sun" and "Sputnik Sweetheart" and "Norwegian Wood" and up there with "Kafka on the Shore" though falling a bit short of "Wind-Up Bird" which is still Murakami's masterpiece I'd say. As far as DDD, the homage to Raymond Chandler is obvious and much appreciated. If Philip Marlow had grown up in Japan, listened to a lot of 60's classic rock (as well as the classical music Marlow fancied) and also liked swimming, cooking, housekeeping, and post-modern irony and metaphysics, then bang--you'd have the anonymous narrator of DDD! The beauty of this book is in the laconic, ironic, satirical, yet also compassionate, decent, and kind narrator. Those are tough qualities to combine, and Murakami pulls it off. The anonymous narrator, much like Chandler's Philip Marlowe, is a guy you'd love to hang out with. He's funny, laid back, honest, and basically a decent guy. He can admit his faults and while he's a little self-centered, he'd own up to that fault in a hurry, and compensates for it by being very patient and very loyal to his friends and fair to his enemies. He doesn't hate, doesn't want what he doesn't have, doesn't aspire to be famous or rich, doesn't hold grudges, and can see the world from the other guy's perspective. I would argue it is the essential likeableness of Murakami's narrators that makes him so readable. And the narrator of DDD is one of the most endearing of all of them, I would argue. As others have noted, I don't think the plot is the reason you read Murakami, so I'm not going to go into that much. Suffice it to say it will keep you turning the pages to find out what happens to them all and the ending doesn't disappoint. But it's for the style, the tone, the questions he raises, the way he makes you look at your life from a whole new angle that you read Murakami and why you should read DDD. Of course, the re-appearance of the Sheep Man in DDD is just a joy difficult to describe. Has anyone else noticed that there is a reference to Siberia (and how awful it is) in almost every Murakami book? Along with swimming, cats, and parallel universes, Siberia is another recurring Murakami theme, though one seemingly less noticed. It's brief, but there in DDD... Murakami seems to write two different novels: straight up love triangles (if there is such a thing) like "Norwegian Wood", "South of the Border...", and "Sputnik Sweetheart", or metaphysical detective stories like "Wild Sheep Chase," "Hardboiled Wonderland..." "Dance, Dance, Dance", "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and "Kafka on the Shore". I've noticed some reviewers like the love stories more, some like the detective stories more, and some, like me, enjoy them both. I think "Wind-up Bird..." i

I do not have much to add to the other positive reviews. The negative ones are just silly (of course apart from the objection against abridging the English edition; that annoys me too, but let's not hold it against HM, and I would not have noticed anyway). I like the comparison made somewhere that this is like Kafka in a Chandler novel, but I have to object to the notion that Kafka had no sense of humour. Please read the Hunger Artist or even the Verwandlung again, what are they if not hilarious in a black sort of way. The protagonist of Dancex3 is sometimes like a Philip Marlowe without a mission, but that is a fleeting impression. He starts off looking for somebody, but gives up quickly. Marlowe wouldn't do that. Nothing sticks. The novel might be a normal noir mystery, if it did not escalate into esoterics once in a while. One expects that from HM. I liked the names of Yuki's disfunctional parents: the father's name, the writer's, is an anagram of HM's, and the mother is called Rain, like Barry Eisler's half Japanese killer. Coincidence? I liked the encounters with unexpected developments: the receptionist, the actor, the writer, of course the brat. One of HM's strengths, developing people relationships off the beaten track. What I mean by my review title: reading Murakami is like listening to Coltrane or the Stones or Brahms, it does not matter so much what the plot is, nor who the characters are, it is a purpose in itself. You don't need to learn anything from it, nor is it to be used in the sense of the protagonist's frequent spouts of "killing time". Of course it is not shoveling snow either. It is what it is. A way of life. Like meditation. Great stuff.

I would still rate 'South of the Border, West of the Sun' more highly, but this is Murakami's most flat-out entertaining novel. Although it's billed as a sequel to Wild Sheep Chase, and it is about the same character, _all_ of Murakami's novels seem to be about the same basic everyman character, and reading Sheep Chase first isn't neccesary (I read this before I read Sheep Chase). Still, Sheep Chase, as Murakami's first novel, provides a good point of reference.The characters in Dance, Dance, Dance are almost exponentially more vibrant than those in Sheep Chase, from the bored, occasionally clairvoyant young girl who might have stepped out of a Salinger novel, to the plucky one-armed American poet. There's an almost cartoonish (not in at all a bad way) quality to these people; they stand out that much, and are that sharply drawn. The intriguing criticism of genius offered in Sheep Chase recurs, more subtly and kindly, in the form of a brilliant woman photographer who happens to be a very poor mother. Murakami is also unexpectedly kind to another character, the superificial actor Gotanda, who reveals a sharply human side. In the end, that may be exactly it about this novel; a sense of warmth and quiet joy underneath everything, even the more sinister events, which not many novels of this modernist type can muster. Every stroke of good fortune seems deserved, and every tragedy is lamented.

Far superior to its successor, the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, this book wonderfully concludes the story of a protagonist started with "Hear The Wind Sing," "Pinball 1973," and "A Wild Sheep Chase." In this book, the protagonist, a self-employed loner who lives outside the "normal" conventions of the Japanese salaryman and society, sets out on a quest to find his girlfriend from "A Wild Sheep Chase." (For those who have not read "A Wild Sheep Chase," I will not ruin for you the circumstances that set this off). For the first few chapters, the protagonist is alone, walking the streets of Hokkaido, sitting in bars by himself and "contemplating the ashtray" (there must be tons of loners out there who can appreciate this) until eventually clues, both supernatural and other, take him to Tokyo and Hawaii, and introduce a slew of unforgettable, well written, deep characters. Such characters include Yuki, the troubled 13 year old psychic who is far superior to the undeveloped clone of May Kasahara in the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, the actor Gotanda, who can portray your life better than you can, the unforgettable detectives Bookish and Fisherman...the list goes on and on. What this book is, basically, is the fulfillment of the personal quest. It is a book that will be best appreciated by people who have been loners, stand removed from the "norms" of society of a wife, a 9 to 5 job in an impersonal office, two kids, a pet, and perhaps even a dedication to any particular religion, and have, as such, culivated a deep level of observation, a bit of an alienation to and from society, and perhaps a personal subconscious inkling/longing for a supernatural happenstance such as The Dolphin Hotel that make up for a lack of belief in any conventional religious notion accepted by the masses...

A sheep-man sits in a hotel room and operates a switchboard connecting the lonely, drifting narrator to a web of unforgottable individuals. The sheep-man's room is full of books about, well, sheep, and the narrator mostly experiences reality with the aid of his thirteen-year-old sort-of girlfriend. Logs of days spent "lolling" on the beach, wonderful descriptions of pizza, allusions to Boy George and the Talking Heads, and the sense of frantically trying to escape something (or is it find something?) all combine to make a novel that is not plotted, but choreographed.Dance Dance Dance is electrifying, captivating, and intense -- and it's pretty brainy too, much like Murakami's characters. The narrator's perspective is standard Murakami: the slightly dreamy, out-of-place 30ish man trying to reason with a world that seems stranger by the minute. Assumptions constantly fall, and no one is sure what or whom to believe. Yet the strange-goings on are the only thing rescuing the narrator from the miasma of ennui that comes from having rejected the dream of being a "salaryman" with a family and a linear, predictable lifestyle. This is a novel about staring out into the unknown -- and staring deeply into that unknown, it seems Murakami is saying, is the only way to find meaning if we reject the traditional lives that have been prearranged for us.The only slightly negative thing I can say about this novel is that the plot and the characters have uncanny similarities to those in The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. It almost seems as if Murakami had one outline of a novel, which could go two different ways, and made one into the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and the other into this book. The narrator's voice, and many of the supporting characters, are exactly the same, as are several plot elements. Overall, this is significant, and highly enjoyable literature. It manages to ask deep questions about reality, fate, relationships, family, and life, while still packing the thrills of something much more pulpish.