Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

All of Murakami’s tropes are here: an insouciant, saucy know-it-all pre-pubescent girl, dark menacing extradimensional spaces, Jazz/Rock, idleness and whiling away time pointlessly, cooking noodles, a beautiful mysterious enigmatic woman who vanishes, an ominous forboding pervading the narrative, eating and drinking, sheep, cats

At the end of May, Kipper, my cat, died. Suddenly, without warning. I woke up one day and found him curled up on the kitchen floor, dead. He himself probably hadn’t known it was happening. His body was cold and hard, sheen gone from the fur. He could hardly have claimed he had the best life. Never really loved by anyone, never seeming really to love anyone either. His eyes always had this uneasy look, like what now? You don’t see that look in a cat too often. But anyway, he was dead. Nothing more. Maybe that’s the best thing about death.

… and, of course, ear-lobes

Her small white ears and the nape of her neck, how like a girl’s neck it was. How different form a mature woman’s neck. Though don’t ask me what I mean by that.

Later

I’d seen these photos of her ears and, well, I got obsessed, to put it mildly … The first day we met, we were at a restaurant and she personally showed me her ears. Personally, I mean not professionally, and they were even more amazing than in the photograph. They were exquisite! Fantastic! … Her ears had special power. They were like some great whirlpool of fate sucking me in. And they could lead people to the right place.

Here are excerpts of vintage Murakamisms

What it reminded me of was a biological dead end. A genetic retrogression. A freak accident of nature that stranded some organism up the wrong path without a way back. Evolutionary vector eliminated, orphaned life-form left cowering behind the curtain of history, in The Land That Time Forgot. And through no fault of anyone. No one to blame, no one to save it…
But he is not the only one who’s crazy about Jodie Cleopatra. There’s a dark, dark Arabian prince who’s burning with passion for her. He’s so in love with that just thinking about her is enough to make him dance. The role is tailor-made for Michael Jackson. He’s crossed the Arabian sands all the way to Egypt for her love. We see him dancing all the way to Egypt for her love. We see him dancing around the caravan camp fire, shaking a tambourine, singing “Billie Jean.” His eyes gleam in the starlight…
I was in a great black vacuum. I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated, I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else. I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality.

Here is Murakami’s propensity to wander off on a tangent during his narrative and endlessly rhapsodize on some inane object or animal

And if you consider the telephone as an object, it has this truly weird form. Ordinarily, you never notice it, but if you stare at it long enough, the sheer oddity of its form hits home. The phone either looks like it’s trying to say something, or else it’s resenting that its trapped inside its form. Pure idea vested within a clunky body. That’s the telephone…
Actually, the telephone looks rather irritated.
It – or let’s call it a “she” – seemed rather pissed off at being less than pure idea. Angered at the uncertain and imperfect grounds upon which volitional communication must necessarily base itself. So very imperfect, so utterly arbitrary, so wholly passive.
I propped myself up on my pillow and watched the telephone fume. A perfectly pointless exercise. It’s not my fault, the phone seemed to be telling me. Well, that’s communication. Imperfect, arbitrary, passive. The lament of the not-quite-pure idea. But I’m not to blame either. The phone probably tell this all the boys. It’s just that being part of these quarters of mine makes her – it – all the more irritable. Which makes me feel responsible. As if I’m aiding and abetting all the imperfection…
“Hard nut to crack, eh, Watson?” I addressed the ashtray before me. The ashtray, of course, did not respond. Smart ashtray. Same went for the coffee cup and sugar bowl and the bill. They all pretended not to hear. Stupid me. I was the one running amok in these weird goings on.

Engrossing yarn. And, to top it all, there is a writer named “Hiraku Makimura” – an anagram of the author’s name.

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