It might look simple, but it never is. It's just like a root. What's above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then.
That's Dance Dance Dance: a root that needs pulling, asking to be examined in a highly personal and idiosyncratic way. I don't know if I could ever recommend this, or any Murakami, because I know what it is inside of me that's being stirred and I don't presume to know the deep darkness where other minds dwell. As a character says in 1Q84, "If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation."
I listened to this book and I think that was a mistake as the narrator wasn't very good (a lot of Sam Spade/film noir, see? And don't get me started on the females…) But this was the first line of many that struck me just right:
Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.
And this notion of precipitation kept recurring: from Yuki (snow) and her mother Ame (rain), to "shovelling snow" (in both senses meant by the narrator -- writing and love-making). In fact, rain and snow figure throughout this book, even in a Kenny Rogers song on the radio. And, ah, the music! Murakami is always so precise about the music his characters are listening to, just as he's precise when describing what they're cooking or eating. But these are all just surface details -- the main character is never even named, presumably because it doesn't matter, it's just another detail, not even an interesting one. If I am rambling and seemingly disorganised, that's just the way this book is: there's an unextraordinary protagonist who eats and sleeps and hangs out with people, occasionally making an astute observation but more likely to be ambivalent about the events in his life; maybe just like the way my own life unfurls around me; maybe just like everyone.
Where Dance Dance Dance comes alive is in detailing what happens when the characters pass through the rabbit hole: whether climbing into a well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or descending a ladder from an elevated highway in 1Q84 or taking an elevator to an impossible floor in this book, Murakami always gives a glimpse at what is happening in the alternate universes that reside just above or below or beside our own. And I am always a little shaken by the characters who can jump between realities, like the Little People in 1Q84:
"Ho ho," called the keeper of the beat.
"Ho ho," the other six joined in.
Or the Sheep Man who acts as the "switchboard operator" in Dance Dance Dance:
"Dance," said the Sheep Man. "Yougottadance. Aslongasthemusicplays. Yougotta dance. Don'teventhinkwhy. Starttothink, yourfeetstop. Yourfeetstop, wegetstuck. Wegetstuck, you'restuck. Sodon'tpayanymind, nomatterhowdumb. Yougottakeepthestep. Yougottalimberup. Yougottaloosenwhatyoubolteddown. Yougottauseallyougot. Weknowyou're tired, tiredandscared. Happenstoeveryone, okay? Justdon'tletyourfeetstop."
This is the kind of book that abides in my subconscious mind; by which I mean without end or beginning. While I might recall bits of it from time to time over the years to come, this scene near the end might have been plucked from the swirling goo that was in there already:
I found myself passing through a transparent pocket of air. It was cool as water. Time wavered, sequentiality twisted, gravity lost its force. Memories, old memories, like vapor, wafted up.. The degeneration of my flesh accelerated. I passed through the huge, complex knot of my own DNA. The earth expanded, then chilled and contracted. Sheep were submerged in the cave. The sea was one enormous idea, rain falling silently over its vastness. Faceless people stood on the beachhead gazing out to the deep. An endless spool of time unraveled across the sky. A void enveloped the phantom figures and was encompassed by a yet greater void. Flesh melted to the bone and blew away like dust. Extremely, irrevocably, dead, said someone. Cuck-koo. My body decomposed, blew apart -- and was whole again. I emerged through this lair of chaos, naked, in bed.
To rate it, I'm going to give it 4 stars, but on my own subjective and idiosyncratic scale, Dance Dance Dance should stand just below The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle which needs to stand just below 1Q84. Maybe I shouldn't use the Goodreads 5 Star scale here so that I reflect these nuances...
"Ho ho," called the keeper of the beat.
Cuck-koo.
The first day I started listening to Dance Dance Dance, I was walking my dog, like I do, and when she stopped to do her business, I stepped off the sidewalk, waiting to scoop the poop, like I do. Over the narrator, I could hear someone approaching and I was bemused to notice that it was an older Japanese-looking fellow, a rare-ish sight around here, and as soon as he passed me he started a slow jog, reminding me immediately of Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Even stranger, as he approached a small park, he turned to look back at me, and for a second, he totally resembled the famous backward-glancing pose of a Bigfoot captured way back when.
Something about that initial experience told me I should be paying attention to this book, and the coincidences got stronger and stranger. That same day, I started reading Ragged Company, which begins with a group of homeless people who go into a movie theater to get out of the cold. The next day listening to Dance Dance Dance, the main character goes into a movie theater to get out of the cold and coincidentally discovers that his ex-girlfriend, someone he has been seeking, is in the movie. The coincidence is so profound that he concludes that it goes beyond mere chance and he should be investigating things further; this contemplation of coincidence, and what is beyond coincidence, was repeated and reinforced.
The next day, on the way home from driving Mal to school, the radio started playing "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", and I was singing along and thinking, "Ok, that's Elton John...and...um...Kiki...Kiki Dee." While listening to my book that day, the main character meets with someone he once knew a long time ago who happened to be in that movie with his ex-girlfriend. He didn't want to admit that he never knew the girl's name so was relieved when the actor mentioned her name was...Kiki.
There were a couple of less significant events (Dave seeing a car and saying, "I don't recognise that logo, what kind of car is that?" and Mal replying, "It's a Subaru" -- just like the main character's car), but I was surprised when one evening Kennedy agreed to come on a walk with me. I was listening to my book and trying to go over the coincidences in my mind, with a view to sharing them with her, when I looked up and saw a Residential Snow Removal ad on a lamp post. This may be Canada but it's hot and sunny here in September and I don't remember seeing that sign there before (and the main character refers to his writing as "shovelling snow"). I eventually decided to tell Kennedy about the odd synchronicity around this book, and I started with the jogger and the movie theater and the song and I started to talk about how the character "shovels snow" and she said, "Just like the snow removal sign?" So she saw it too -- that felt highly odd, that we both noticed and remembered a small sign that had no significance for either of us personally. I got to end with the mind blower, though:
"Remember when we were passing in front of the school and that Japanese-looking man jogged past us?"
"Uh huh," she said. "I wondered if he was the same guy you saw before when you were talking about him."
"Totally different guy than I saw before. I would have noticed that big white stripe down the back of his hair if that had been the same guy."
So I knew the universe was telling me to pay attention (yes! I know how stupid and self-important that sounds), and I kept listening and kept listening, waiting for the big message, and I think it's the passage I ended the book review with:
I found myself passing through a transparent pocket of air. It was cool as water. Time wavered, sequentiality twisted, gravity lost its force. Memories, old memories, like vapor, wafted up. The degeneration of my flesh accelerated. I passed through the huge, complex knot of my own DNA. The earth expanded, then chilled and contracted. Sheep were submerged in the cave. The sea was one enormous idea, rain falling silently over its vastness. Faceless people stood on the beachhead gazing out to the deep. An endless spool of time unraveled across the sky. A void enveloped the phantom figures and was encompassed by a yet greater void. Flesh melted to the bone and blew away like dust. Extremely, irrevocably,dead, said someone. Cuck-koo. My body decomposed, blew apart -- and was whole again. I emerged through this lair of chaos, naked, in bed.
That really did shake me and I think it's a warning about these parallel universes, whether mystical or a natural result of quantum mechanics, that so fascinate me: Just as early explorers put Here Be Monsters on the edges of their maps beyond the known world, perhaps I should be wary of going down my own rabbit hole again (and one day I will take the time to detail what freaked me out so much when I started looking into this notion of parallel worlds, not certain whether I should only look kind of flaky now or risk putting it all down and remove all doubt). So many books I've read lately have characters that commune with "the other side" (The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The Golem and the Jinni, Ragged Company, Dance Dance Dance), and these aren't storylines that I'm consciously seeking, so it feels like Murakami is warning me: Here Be Monsters.
Something to think about anyway.
