Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
Posted in Other fiction, Reading Reviewed at 10:20 on 13 March 2009
Vintage, 2003.
An unnamed male narrator feels a compulsion to return to a hotel in Sapporo where one of his former lovers, who called herself Kiki and later left him abruptly, once took him. The old hotel is gone, replaced by a brand spanking new one but the staff are reluctant to speak about the old place.
He befriends a female receptionist who tells him of a strange experience she had on exiting a lift on the sixteenth floor into utter darkness. Later, he has a similar episode on the same floor, an almost dreamlike encounter with someone he calls the Sheep Man who tells him to dance, dance, dance through his life.
As he prepares to return to Tokyo the receptionist prevails on him to accompany a thirteen year old girl, Yuki, whose mother, a famous but self-centred photographer, has upped and gone to Thailand on a shoot, forgetting all about her daughter. Yuki and he keep in touch after they get back and gradually become friends as he is more considerate to her than either of her parents is.
When seeing his old schoolmate Gotanda acting in a film with Kiki, he decides to contact the actor to try to find out where she is now.
The remainder of the novel explores the various relationships between the characters as the narrator tries to puzzle out the mysteries he encounters and what happened to Kiki.
The translation by Alfred Birnbaum is very good – my only quibble being that it is into American. We therefore get ‘fit’ and ‘shined’ as past tenses (shined? of a torch?) installment, and suspenders instead of braces.
While there are some strangenesses – the sixteenth floor, an apparent ability to walk through walls in later dreamlike sequences – the overall effect is realistic enough. The decision to use the name Hiraku Mikamura, an obvious anagram of the author’s, for Yuki’s father seemed to me a bit odd, though, an authorial joke or game with little apparent dramatic purpose.
This is only the second Murakami I have read – the other is Norwegian Wood – and I will have no hesitation in seeking out others.
Tags: Haruki Murakami
