Dance Dance Dance By Haruki Murakami Translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum. 393 pages. Kodansha International.
Haruki Murakami, Japan's most popular novelist, writes metaphysical Far Easterns with a Western beat. His rapid-fire style and American tastes seem deliberately designed to break any possible connection to traditional novelists from his own country like Kobo Abe, Yukio Mishima or Yasunari Kawabata, Japan's only Nobel laureate in literature. True, in his fiction there are echoes of Raymond Chandler, John Irving and Raymond Carver, but Mr. Murakami's mysterious plots and original characters are very much his own creation.
Dance Dance Dance is the latest and liveliest example of Mr. Murakami's frequent-flier fiction. His characters are constantly on the go. In the novel, the author takes the reader on a business-class trip across two cultures, from Japan to Hawaii and back home again. His protagonist is a 34-year-old freelance writer at loose ends who doesn't need much money and is always ready for new adventures.
Along the way, the freelancer encounters various women: dream girls, nice girls, call girls and a mature, smart-alecky 13-year-old named Yuki. Yuki almost steals the novel away from the protagonist because she's so wise, sad and witty. She behaves like Eloise at the Plaza and thinks like an unblemished Lolita. It's a tribute to Mr. Murakami's abilities as a seasoned novelist (A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) that all of his female characters stand out as individuals.
The unnamed protagonist in Dance Dance Dance, faced with an early midlife crisis after a divorce, appears to be living on the rungs of a psychic stepladder, treading gingerly between depression and nihilism. To make an occasional living, he lowers himself in his own eyes by writing restaurant reviews for a women's magazine. With self-contempt, he describes his writing this way: "Shoveling snow. You know, cultural snow."
As in his imaginative novel A Wild Sheep Chase, Mr. Murakami's man takes swipes at the Japanese conglomerates that gobble up small companies and at the bribery that is built into business and government. "Advanced capitalism has transcended itself," the freelancer says. "Not to overstate things, financial dealings have practically become a religious activity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porsches and Tokyo land values. Worshiping everything their shiny Porsches symbolize. It's the only stuff of myth that's left in the world."
Mr. Murakami's novels are fairly apolitical, but this time there's a plot reason behind his protagonist's comments about capitalism in the 1980's. The freelancer is trying to find an attractive young woman of limited virtue with whom he once shared a room in Sapporo in the seedy but homey Hotel Dolphin. She has disappeared; even more strangely, so has the hotel. In its place now stands one of those glass-and-steel caravansaries with flags of various nations waving along the driveway. The Hotel Dolphin has been replaced by the pretentiously named "l'Hotel Dauphin."
Enter the Sheep Man, whom we have met before in A Wild Sheep Chase. Who is he? And what is he doing in the dark corridors of the Dolphin that, somehow, still exists if one pushes the right elevator button, and walking through walls inside the Dauphin? The Sheep Man may be whatever the author allows the reader to think he is: phantom, conscience, elder wise man, sci-fi figment, symbol of goodness in a rotten world, maybe all of these. Whichever, the Sheep Man has only one piece of philosophical advice for the freelancer: "Dance. As long as the music plays."
A reader puzzled by the Sheep Man must be patient with Mr. Murakami. For Dance Dance Dance becomes a murder mystery when several of the freelancer's acquaintances begin to disappear. At the same time, the heart of the novel contains a story about the changing needs of love. A woman with interesting ears is replaced by a woman wearing interesting spectacles.
My favorite character, 13-year-old Yuki, drops pearls of wisdom to the 34-year-old freelancer. They're together because he is acting as her companion at the request of her estranged parents, who are busy with their own love affairs and businesses. At one point, speaking contritely of her mother's deceased American boyfriend, whom she once called a goon, Yuki says, "Mediocrity's like a spot on a shirt -- it never comes off."
Americanisms dance across the pages of the novel, practically turning Japan into an anchored aircraft carrier for American products and culture. The protagonist eats two doughnuts for breakfast at Dunkin' Donuts and burgers for lunch at McDonald's; he also drops into the Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dairy Queen franchises. Truman Capote, Count Basie, Keith Haring, Darth Vader, Clint Eastwood, Walt Disney, Gerry Mulligan and Jodie Foster are all mentioned. In between listening to rock tapes while tooling along in his old Subaru, the freelancer reads a biography of Jack London.
Mr. Murakami's keen translator, Alfred Birnbaum, who keeps Dance Dance Dance hopping, valiantly interprets the author's numerous references to American music, books and movies. In fact, he may even exceed the challenge now and then by dropping in a New Yorkism, as when the freelancer says: "Before noon I drove to Aoyama to do shopping at the fancy-schmancy Kinokuniya supermarket."
Wonder how you say fancy-schmancy in Japanese?