Dance Dance Dance (1988) (The Rat, #4) by Haruki Murakami

Work hard. Live modestly. Look at the big picture.

Dance Dance Dance is surprisingly excellent.

Not that I expected it to be bad. Rather, I didn't really expect anything because Dance hardly gets talked about at all within discussions of Murakami's work. I've heard almost exclusively that Kafka on the Shore or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are his best novels, with small but adamant groups also touting Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or sometimes 1Q84. But there is almost no mention of Dance Dance Dance in these discussions.

Perhaps this is because so few people have read Murakami extensively. He has a reputation for having a short shelf-life, mostly due to the fact that he reuses many of the same tropes over his novels. The fact that Dance is the fourth episode in Murakami's only multi-novel series leads me to believe that people either shy away from picking this up without first reading the prior novels—rightly so, in my opinion—or, they're reading it independently without the proper lead-in of the prior episodes— Hear the Wind Sing , Pinball, 1973 , and A Wild Sheep Chase —which is a mistake, in my opinion, since many of the events in Dance are a callback to prior novels that require your experience with them to have the proper impact.

No matter the reason, my point is that this book doesn't have the glowing reputation it deserves.

This is the sixth Murakami novel I've read as of my typing this, and I've read all three of the prior books of the Rat series, so perhaps I'm uniquely equipped to receive the quality of this book in ways which not many other folks reviewing this on Goodreads are.

I resolved to read Murakami's works in order of publishing after completing Norwegian Wood (1987) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) earlier this year. Having finished the first three entries in the Rat series (1979-1982), I picked up Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) and Dance Dance Dance (1988) in audiobook form to consume while traveling in Southeast Asia. I began both nearly at the same time and intended to "read" them concurrently since I had just finished A Wild Sheep Chase and wanted the events of that book fresh in my mind when reading Dance—which is a direct sequel to it—but I found Dance to be so compelling right out of the gate that I set down Hard-Boiled almost immediately.

Witnessing Murakami's personal progress as a writer throughout The Rat series is a treat. Each book makes huge leaps in quality. The first two are almost not worth reading. A Wild Sheep Chase is a good book, but very uneven, as its first half meanders along before closing out strongly. And then comes Dance, by far the best book in the series and its conclusion. You can chart Murakami's growth as a writer through each entry in the series even without considering his two "experiments" of his early career (Norwegian Wood, a comparably reserved coming-of-age sexual awakening tale which I loved, and the aforementioned Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a mind-bending trip down the rabbit-hole blending cyberpunk and fantasy which I'm currently in the middle of). And that growth is astounding. He went from a writer who, though already skilled at putting his thoughts into words, was not quite skilled at expressing exactly what he wanted to say, or how he wanted to say it—and perhaps aping other writers he enjoyed a bit too much along the way—to a fully fledged postmodern writer in his own right. It's a bit tough to get through some of his early stuff, but I greatly enjoyed witnessing the growth firsthand and I'm glad I did it.

I've left too many loose ends hanging. So now I'm trying to tie up as many of those loose ends as I can.

In the most concise manner in which I could judge it, I'd describe Dance Dance Dance as the culmination of early Murakami and the best work of his early career.

I find it most easy to compare this book primarily to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, one which nearly everyone who has read Murakami has picked up since it's one of his top two or three most famous works. I find them to be quite similar to one another. They share similar themes of existential worry, the monotony of having your spirit pulverized by ennui, and thirtysomething protagonists who feel lost and unaccomplished. They also feature the same common Murakami tropes that he's famous for: The lost girlfriend/wife, the platonic teenage companion, psychic characters, otherworldly locations. The difference is that Dance executes its ideas in such a more polished, concise, cohesive manner than Wind-Up Bird does. Dance resolves nearly all of the questions remaining from its prior entries along with those within its own pages. Wind-Up Bird doesn't have the added baggage of previous entries and still it does not even answer its own compelling questions; something that bothered me about it and damaged its value in my judgment. Dance also feels far more smoothly paced. Probably it lacks the highest highs of Wind-Up Bird—Kamiya's backstory, or the cause of Cinnamon's dumbness—but it comes nowhere near the lows Wind-Up Bird dips into with its needless ambiguity and contrived weirdness. Dance is also incredibly readable, with Murakami's signature smooth, fluid prose that turns a 10-minute reading session into a ninety minute block in which you realize too late that you're now only going to get 6 hours of sleep before waking for work tomorrow.Murakami's character writing shows a huge improvement over past books, and even trumps some of his characters in later books such The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Gotanda, the narcissistic actor with perhaps more than a bit of a serial killer streak, was a favorite of mine. He reminded me a bit of the Trader in Murakami's short story Barn Burning. I also really liked the character of Yuki, whom I found sounded like a genuine teenager—the teenage "voice" being something that seems par-for-the-course for middle-aged writers to bungle in frequently hilarious ways. The minor characters are also colorful and memorable; the one-armed poet Dick, the subpar and uninspired yet still successful writer named Hiraku Makimura—clearly a self-deprecating reference to the author himself after Murakami's own success following the more mainstream Norwegian Wood, which he published only a year prior to Dance Dance Dance. These characters occupy little pagecount but are memorable diversions nonetheless and serve to break up what could have been a bit of a dry narrative without them.

Like other Murakami lovers, I often find it difficult to articulate why he's so appealing to me. I don't care much for his themes because, as a relatively happy person who is satisfied with my life and facing no existential crisis, I don't much relate to them. And I'm not a huge fan of fantasy or magical realism in the first place. But when I read Murakami he has a way of communicating to me that seems more efficient than other authors are able to. I read him more quickly, I'm more easily able to grasp the ideas he's exploring than other authors, and I feel like I know his characters more intimately with much less exposure. It's as if he has a direct link to my brain. I love reading his work.

Murakami's prose is often akin to comfort food to me—easily and pleasurably consumed, though rarely as soulfully nourishing and impactful as a lot of classic literature I've read. I tear through his work at speed but rarely double back to reread certain passages, or pause to let their beauty wash over me as I've done with English written by Nabokov or a Brontë. Dance Dance Dance, however, is the first time I've felt that notion challenged, and for it to shine even through translation is remarkable.

This book features more profound and poetic passages than any other work of his I've read thus far:

“The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.”

“Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.”

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

“People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.”

“I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated. I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else.I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality.”

“She was truly a beautiful girl. I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all.”

If you like Murakami, Dance Dance Dance is a must-read. It's gorgeous, fluid, profound, and pacey. It's the high point of his work so far, but the barrier to entry is somewhat high, because if you want to get the most out of Dance Dance Dance, I highly recommend that you read The Rat series in order:

1) Hear the Wind Sing (1979)
2) Pinball, 1973 (1980)
3) A Wild Sheep Chase (1982)
4) Dance Dance Dance (1988)

⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) (The Rat, #3) by Haruki Murakami

I read A Wild Sheep Chase just after completing Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (the two notably rough entries with which Murakami began his writing career) and having previously read Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (my dual introductions to both melancholy, introspective, concrete Murakami and magical, weird, surrealist Murakami). I felt after completing these four works I was well-equipped to handle the rest of Murakami's work, and I'll be proceeding in order of publication from here on out.

With Sheep you can feel Murakami beginning to warm up to what would become his signature style. It's hard to compare it to his first two novels as the scope is so much vaster, but it's generally a more worthwhile work in my opinion, with bigger ideas that are more skillfully executed. Gone is the meandering, arbitrary cloud of a narrative that made up his first two novels, replaced by a more structured narrative focused on the oddball MacGuffin that is searching for a demonic, possessive Sheep. This plotline was so weird it was impossible for me to take seriously, which may have been the point. Luckily, this being my 5th Murakami novel, I've long since learned to stop trying to analyze where Murakami's taking me or how he's getting me there and begun to switch off my brain and allow him to do his thing.

This book felt like a rougher first pass of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. While it resolves much of its ambiguity in a far more satisfying way than that book (unsurprising considering Wind-Up Bird was subject to a damaging series of editing upon its translation that removed several key portions of the story), but its pace is not as tight as Bird's, and its diversions and its motifs are not nearly as compelling as those found in its descendant. Sheep starts very slowly and only get moving at a satisfying paced after about two-thirds of the way into it. Wind-Up Bird felt like it was cruising along the entire way and felt much lighter than its 600 pages, while Sheep feels every bit of its 350. I also felt his prose was rougher and that this book lacked some of the more quotable pieces of wisdom often present in Murakami's work, but perhaps that's just subjective. This is really all to be expected as Murakami was just beginning to find his style. That said, from all the praise I've heard for this novel (it's named in his Wikipedia page as one of his most noteworthy novels), I expected it to be a bit better. It certainly helped me to discover what The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle does so well, and it helped me learn just how much I actually enjoyed reading that book.

That's not to say that A Wild Sheep Chase is not worth reading. If you're a Murakami fan, you'll probably enjoy it. I liked it, even though it was uneven and lacked the polish that his later work features. Murakami has a tendency to run off on tangents, which, at face value, seem as if they'd disrupt the pace and devolve into boring exposition. For example, late in Sheep, Murakami spends a dozen pages describing, in detail, how a village in northern Hokkaido was settled. To summarize: Some dudes migrate as far north as possible to get away from paying debts they owe. They learn to farm with the help of a local Ainu (indigenous peoples of the island), they deal with adversity, start families, etc. It sounds like it'd be boring as all hell, but Murakami's talent as a masterful storyteller somehow allows him to spin such seemingly shoehorned tangent into a compelling piece of the whole. It's one of the things I love about him, and something stands out greatly as a strong feature of his work as a whole. A lot of folks will criticize Murakami's tendency to repeat the same calling cards in each novel (passive male protagonists, lost cats, ear fetishes, psychic women, cooking, jazz and classical music... Do I need to continue?), but these diversions into niche historical storytelling, along with his much more obscure, surreal metaphysical themes, are what make each Murakami novel a new enough experience for me to continue exploring his work. I may not always like how his protagonists lack agency, his characters lack depth, or how his plotting always seems too coincidental and convenient, but I can put up with that stuff to experience what I love about him--even in one of his rougher novels, like this one.

 I've got a trip to southeast Asia involving a couple of 17+ hour flights coming up next week, and I've loaded up on the audiobooks. I'll be listening to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World over one of these flights, a novel I'm greatly looking forward to, as it is one of the few (including only Kafka on the Shore from his entire oeuvre) that seems to have garnered universal love from among the Murakami faithful.

I'm excited to be through Murakami's training-wheels phase and to start cracking into some of his most well-respected work.

⭐⭐⭐

Pinball, 1973 (1980) (The Rat, #2) by Haruki Murakami

Both this and Hear The Wind Sing (Murakami's first two novels, which he wrote while owning and operating a jazz club for a living) are nowhere near as poor as I felt I'd been led to believe. Hearing Murakami speak about them in interviews, you'd have thought they were both terrible. And this is not quite so in my opinion.

Pinball, 1973 dials down the Vonnegut-aping of its predecessor and seems a far more focused approach as well. Murakami was slowly finding his voice and made significant progress with this effort. The book is also far more beautiful than Murakami's first even though it feels like he isn't trying as hard and is just going with the flow more often. I found certain excerpts profound.

Murakami captures the feeling of being existentially lost exceptionally in the Rat's chapters and I really enjoyed them. I enjoyed those of the nameless protagonist substantially less, though Murakami's fluid, enjoyable prose kept me reading. The twins come off as a shameless example of wish fulfillment and I found them hokey, but I thought the protagonists interactions with his co-worker were quite charming and genuine and I found the minutiae of his translation job oddly compelling. The pinball portions were presented in an interesting manner, though I'm a layman with no prior interest in the game.

This is an enjoyable read but I still feel like Murakami doesn't quite tie things together enough to feel like a cohesive novel. Murakami meanders about in passages that are little more than glorified journal entries. So far my experience with Murakami has indicated that his books are often made up of superb quality parts that don't necessarily come together as well as they could. This book doesn't even attempt to. Readers criticize Murakami's contrived MacGuffins but at least they drive the narrative forward. His first two novels, though they touch on some intriguing ideas, seem to start nowhere and go nowhere.

That said, you can see when comparing this book and his first that his ideas, themes, and motifs, though small now, are building like a snowball rolling downhill and gradually taking on mass as they become bigger, more complex, more developed, and thus more compelling, as they are in future books. And not only do the vignettes get better, but the books feel more cohesive as well.

Pinball, 1973 is just okay. It's flawed, but still better than I expected.

⭐⭐

My read-through of Murakami's entire oeuvre continues with A Wild Sheep Chase next, and I'm really looking forward to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Dance Dance Dance, both of which I've heard very good things about. (I've already read Norwegian Wood , my introduction to Murakami, which is why I'll be skipping that though it was published between Hard-Boiled and Dance)

NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS

The Rat spent many tranquil afternoons settled in his rattan chair. When he began to drift off, he could feel time pass through his body like gently flowing water. As he sat, hours, days, weeks went by. Occasionally, ripples of emotion would lap against his heart as if to remind him of something. When that happened, he closed his eyes, clamped his heart shut, and waited for the emotions to recede. It was only a brief sensation, like the shadows that signal the coming of night. Once the ripple had passed, the quiet calm returned as if nothing untoward had ever taken place.

Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there" was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.

When the sun went down, and touches of blue filtered into the fading afterglow, an orange lamp would light up in the knob of the bell and slowly begin to revolve. The beacon always pinpointed the onset of nightfall exactly. Against the most gorgeous sunsets or in dim drizzling mist, the beacon was ever true to its appointed moment: that precise instant in the alchemy of light and dark when darkness tipped the scales.

Hear the Wind Sing (1979) (The Rat, #1) by Haruki Murakami

I really like Murakami. There's something about the way he writes and tells stories that really clicks with me. I've read two of his novels already (Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; loved the former and liked the latter) and both flew by very quickly. I enjoyed them enough that I made it a point to read more Murakami, so I decided to start with Hear the Wind Sing—his very first novel—and make my way forward chronologically from there.

I've read quite a bit of internet discussion on Murakami and the general consensus is that he tends to burn you out after you've read just a few of his books since he reuses so many of the same themes and tropes. I started to worry that maybe I was making a mistake picking this up, like I was 'wasting' my 2-3 Murakami books I'd get to enjoy before I got tired of him and wouldn't be able to enjoy later favorites of his such as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Sputnik Sweetheart, or Kafka on the Shore—all of which I've heard much praise for and am looking forward to laying into.

I'm happy to say that wasn't the case. I expected a really rough book with Wind, as reception isn't nearly as positive as his later work, and Murakami himself has stated that he's not happy with the book and considers it relatively poor when compared to his post-Sheep work. I ended up liking it more than I expected. I was surprised how developed Murakami's prose already was. I had expected much rougher, but it reads similarly to the later novels that clicked so well with me.

His narrative and characters are very bare, though. It starts strongly when the narrator has an awkward first encounter with a nine fingered girl in which we are placed in media res which immediately grabbed me, but fails to evolve from there and becomes more and more scattered as the novel continues. The characters lack depth, the themes present are weakly explored, and Murakami is prone to stylistic tangents such as odd radio host monologues that don't seem to have much to do with anything, or the portions in which the narrator describes a zany fictional science fiction writer he enjoys (someone had been reading Slaughterhouse-Five around 1979). You can tell Murakami had trouble finding something at the core of this story to write about; something to pull all of these disparate portions of the narrative together. But I suppose that comes with the territory of a first novel by an untrained writer.

I don't regret reading this, but I am looking forward to making my way onward to later novels. It's worth a pick-up for Murakami fans looking to do a full read of his entire body of work like I am, but it's a decidedly poor place to start for the uninitiated.

⭐⭐