Haruki Murakami - Dance Dance Dance

"High class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic thirteen-year-old drop-out with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem. Combine this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose and out comes Dance Dance Dance. It is an assault on the senses, part murder mystery, part metaphysical speculation; a fable for our times as catchy as a rock song blasting from the window of a sports car."

I have a terrible habit of getting excited by the thought of books...the need to own them which results in piles of books I really want to read, but don't seem to get around to for a long, long time (this is currently the case with Brick Lane). In full dreadfully materialist honesty, very much the same can happen with CDs...and DVDs too. Perhaps I have a problem!

Anyway, I am not here for a shrink session, but to talk about Haruki Murakami and, specifically, his book Dance Dance Dance. The above introduction (mine, not the official 'blurb') results from me purchasing Norwegian Wood I really don't know how long ago. I only finally got around to it this year and, once I did, it made me want to read all of his novels! Dance Dance Dance was my second of his, and I finished it just recently.

I love Murakami's lyrical style of prose, his 'human' characters with bona fide human faults and confusions, and the subtle references to songs and pieces of music - placed so perfectly that they almost become characters in themselves, like when a song is so intrinsically tied to a memory that even hearing those first few bars conjures up vivid images in your head.

I am also a fan of the surreal - in art, in film, in literature - and Murakami nails this, without it ever seeming contrived, and without crossing that (for me) all-important line over into true fantasy or science fiction writing.

I can see Murakami books as I read them. The character-centric details, for example the descriptions of a woman's ears in this specific novel, make imagining almost unnecessary...the list of players really does come to life. I really hate it when a film is made of a book and the characters do not look like they did in your head, it spoils the whole illusion - I have always thought this, from reading Mallory Towers books as a child and feeling that the pictures on the front of the book did not represent the characters that I saw.

Some examples (from the first 30 pages of Dance Dance Dance):

"A fat maid walked the halls with elephant strides, ponderously, ominously coughing."

"High school girls came bustling along, their rosy red cheeks puffing white breaths you could have written cartoon captions in."

"Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory."

"A real live hotelier by the looks of him. I'd met enough of them in my line of work. They are a dubious species, with twenty-five different smiles on call for every variety of circumstance. From the cool and cordial twinge of disinterest to the measured grin of satisfaction. They wield the entire arsenal by number, like golf clubs for particular shots."

Haruki Murakami's writing often reminds me of another of my favourite authors, in a number of ways: the surreal imagery; the journey inside the protagonist's mind (which is often somewhere far short of 'peachy' in terms of mental health); the intimately detailed descriptions; the poetic turns of phrase; the personality and idiosyncrasy. The writer of whom I speak is Richard Brautigan (although all of the above could also be true of Tom Robbins), whose work I urge you to read if you are unfamiliar with it to date. Although not as well-known as Jack Kerouac and the like, he was one of San Francisco's beat poets and, whilst his books are very 'of the time', they are so beautifully written that, in my opinion, there is no issue about them being dated.

I came here with the intention of actually writing a book review of Dance Dance Dance, but it seems to have turned into an all-out rant. I kind of like it that way, and think I will just leave this as my stream-of-consciousness first 'bash', without self-editing or worrying about my own writing style and vocabulary. It gives you all the more reason to read the book, rather than just the precis!

I was especially pleased to be able to find five whole songs of the same title! Here they are:

Dance Dance Dance - Lykke Li

Dance Dance Dance (Live) - Neil Young

Dance Dance Dance - The Beach Boys

Dance, Dance, Dance - The Steve Miller Band

Dance Dance Dance (Yowsah Yowsah Yowsah) - Chic

Buy Dance Dance Dance