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Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami


Freewheeling Andy

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Ahhh!

 

As one of the reviews on Amazon I've just been looking at says: Read more Murakami.

 

Dance, Dance, Dance is a sort-of-follow-up to A Wild Sheep Chase, although you don't have to have any background from Sheep Chase to appreciate Dance, Dance, Dance.

 

It is, really, very, very Murakami. It's quite weird coming to this straight after reading David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, which is very much a homage to the former. They both play with the ideas of interconnectedness of events, with the strangeness of modern Japan, and with the impact of the extraordinary on very normal people.

 

The difference, though, is that Mitchell ties everything together with "real" stuff; whereas with Murakami everything is linked together in a semi-mystical way where there is another plane connecting everything.

 

In this way, he is perhaps closer to cyber-punk than to anything in modern fiction. It's taking William Gibson back from the techies and placing it in mundane middle-class suburban Japan.

 

In Dance, Dance, Dance, the narrator is linked to a series of deaths, and keeps encountering more and more bizarre characters who in turn threaten him, and give him a charmed, charmed life. I'm not sure there's really much place for describing the plot in the review, as there never is really, with this author. It's all about the place, the characters, the weirdness of events which you discover are interlinked.

 

Anyway, this seems like a useless review, but perhaps it is actually impossible to really review Murakami, except to mention the characters, the 13 year old not-girlfriend girlfriend, the one armed poet, the deranged photographer, the hotel clerk who embodies hotel-ness.

 

I guess, like others of his books, it's about how even the most mundane and linear of suburban Japanese salary-man lives can get transformed by extraordinary events. But that really doesn't do it justice.

 

What I really mean to say is Read more Murakami.

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What I really mean to say is Read more Murakami.

Oh gosh. I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle a few years ago, and found it to be rather bizarre. I wouldn't say I didn't enjoy it, but I got to the end not quite knowing or understanding what had happened. ;)

 

I might try another one for comparison one day!

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I would say that's normal for Murakami, although it's probably worse in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle than anything else of his I've read. This had a bit more of a contained plot, but it's still not exactly obvious what is happening, nor why. But that's one of the things I like about these novels. They're so unlike most other books.

 

I guess they're perhaps similar to some beat novels like Brautigan's Sombrero Fallout, or to some of the Philip K Dick, I think.

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