Haruki Murakami: Dance Dance Dance

• ISBN-13: 9780679753797
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1/28/1995
• Pages: 416

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.
 As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami's protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls; plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic; and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs.

 I have a little story about my relationship with Haruki Murakami. When I was in high school, my English teacher, one of the few people I connected with on a level outside of the academic because we were weirdly the same person, except that he used to be a male model and didn't give a flying rat's ass about how cocky he was, suggested I read Murakami. He said he thought I'd really enjoy his work. I was skeptical, mostly because I have such a wide range of interests, it's extremely difficult to predict what I might like. Also, because when people tell me to read or watch something, I'm more likely to put it off, even if I'd been planning to try it anyway. It's a quirk. So, of course it took me something like four or five years to actually read Murakami. And even then it was for a Japanese literature class, and we didn't read one of his more famous works, but a collection of short stories. Although they were bizarre, they were interesting and I agreed that I should read the rest of his magnum opus.
 Starting with Dance Dance Dance because that's the first one I found at Borders' going out of business sale. The nameless protagonist of this tale reminds me of a stoic sea creature - constantly being moved around and carried by the current of the ocean around him, but not incapable of fight or flight when necessary. He's an observer, for the most part, and his life becomes increasingly strange and bizarrely interconnected as he focuses on just living in the moment. There's a Sheep Man that tells him that all you can do is keep dancing. And that's really what life is about, isn't it? We all get hard knocks every once in a while, but we have no choice but to keep moving forward, and keep living. Only by doing this can we be open to those little moments that make life so exciting and worth living. That is the grand philosophical idea that I took from this novel.
 The story is, I said, bizarre. But there's a strange humor throughout. Even as the people around him act irrationally and the threads of them all are brought together, there are moments that the oddity of the circumstances bring levity to the circumstances. He also has a habit of saying utterly out of place things and often only gets a "You're strange" for his pains. Don't worry, dude. I'm with you.
 Overall: A-
 At times, I was a little bored and his stream-of-consciousness writing was oppressive at times. However, it was overall quite entertaining and like I said, I took a rewarding lesson from it.