Monday, December 19, 2011

"Dance, Dance, Dance" by Haruki Murakami

This book is Murakami's 6th novel and it should be kind of a sequel of 'Wild Sheep Chase', but not exactly.  The unnamed narrator (Baku- I in Japanese) spent 4 years doing mostly nothing since he came back from Sapporo, Hokaido and the Dolphin Hotel, however he keeps feeling drawn back to it, and hears the girl who dissappeared there crying for him. Baku goes to Sapporo again, but the old Dolphin hotel is gone. There is a shiny-looking monstrosity instead.  However the SheepMan is still there and so is a cute receptionist (Yumiyoshi is her name we learn at the end, how fascinating that many characters in Murakami's books have no  names or symbolic names) which has also seen the dark 16th floor and 'is connected' in the SheepMan's switchboard (we learn later).
Baku goes back to Tokyo with an angst-filled teenager of 13 who is also psychic, in a way.  Baku is lost in the world of his superstar actor-friend, the superstar parents of Yuki (famous writer and photographer, the writers name an anagram of Haruki Murakami).  He becomes a baby sitter for the little Yuki and takes her to Hawaii with generous monetary help from her parents, who cannot be bothered, it seems with full-time parenting. In all that, the connections to the world of the SheepMan do not weaken, whether it is through a Thai hooker or a vision of Kiki that leads Baku to an apartment with six skeletons.
Back in Tokyo, and away from the police who gave Baku hell for a few days before because of the murder of a high-class call-girl Mai, his actor-friend turns out to have murdered Kiki, or maybe not? Maybe Kiki just disappeared from this world as if she never existed here.  However dream and reality melds for Baku, as in most Murakami novels, and maybe that is how it should be.  We all live in personal realities which are just individual reflections and bastardizations of the objective reality, which cannot be objectively perceived anyway, thanks to our human senses.  Thus is everything is subjective why not push that subjectivity into directions which makes sense only to us and make only us happy instead of buying into the current consensus reality being pushed down our throats from every possible direction.
At the end, as all Murakami's books, this one is also about losing something, getting lost yourself, and then finding everything, after one passes through a myriad of trials and soul-searchings, some in the outside world and some in the inside one.

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