Dance Dance Dance picks up where A Wild Sheep Chase left off. The unnamed, everyman narrator is shell-shocked from the events of the previous novel and worried that he has no connection to the world except for his well-worn Subaru. He makes a comfortable living on whatever freelance writing jobs come his way, or “shovelling cultural snow” as he puts it, and spends the rest of his time doing the things that Murakami protagonists do: drinking beer, walking the streets, making simple meals and listening to music. He is, in a word, adrift.
But someone is crying out for him in the dark: his old girlfriend, Kiki, with the perfect ears, who disappeared at the end of the last novel. To pick up the thread of his life, he knows he must find her. His search takes him back to Sapporo, to the Dolphin Hotel, which sets in motion a chain of events that bring into his orbit a psychic fourteen-year-old Talking Heads fan, her world class photographer and space cadet mother, a depressive movie star who hates his dependable image, and the Sheep Man, who tells him one thing: “You gotta dance.”
Dance Dance Dance was published after Norwegian Wood, which earned Murakami such unwanted fame in Japan that he fled the country. While it is a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, it is not considered part of the Trilogy of the Rat books that made up Murakami’s first three novels, and it does not carry over any of the political and historical commentary. Instead, it is a much more inward looking, psychological book that sees the author dealing with the trappings of success. Read the rest of this entry »
Murakami on Hitchens
February 12, 2012Not really. Murakami has never written on Hitchens, as far as I know. That would be exciting though, wouldn’t it? For me.
But I’m reading The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and when I read the following passage on one of the characters, Noboru Wataya (the man, not the cat – it’ll makes sense if you read the book), I immediately thought of Hitchens.
Too harsh?
PS Does an extended quote count as a blog post?
PPS Murakami uses alot of redundant sentences, huh? It’s all about the rhythm, though.
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