Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I had thought I was done with Murakami’s books. But this one in particular got to me. Despite the fact that Murakami often seems as though he’s picking nouns from a GQ mad lib, by about 2/3 he had me hooked. Somehow Murakami is able to dig through the specifics of being you, being his character, and touch upon some sublime connection where each human can see. The nameless narrator, weird in his mannerisms, his thoughts and his tastes (and yet standard for Murakami), ends up speaking to the human condition by speaking to other characters.
There’s really nothing to recommend the character as a moral paragon, or as an ideal of any sort. And the other characters? They are foils for each other, to prop one another up, so that the main character can be faced with recognizing a unique situation.
I think the turn happens for me when we realize that there are a set number of characters surrounding the main character who are going to die. This changes how he behaves, as in a Heidigger kind of way, when facing death, he becomes resolute. Perhaps this is due to his social isolation; his recovery from when his wife left him. In any case, the point at which he becomes most complete as a character is the point at which he is able to really care about others again. Murakami’s craft as a writer is when he is able to leave us off at the maximal point of suspense, that when we would find the answer for life is when we would miss it the most.
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