Foreign Language Friday: Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

Dear blog,
Because I haven't done a Foreign Language Friday, and Dance Dance Dance is one of those adult books that's so good I just have to review it.

Name: Dance Dance Dance (originally published as Dansu Dansu Dansu)
Written by: Haruki Murakami
First published in: Japanese
Translated by: Alfred Birnbaum
Summary (from Goodreads): In this propulsive novel by the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Elephant Vanishes, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work in any language fuses science fiction, the hard-boiled thriller, and white-hot satire into a new element of the literary periodic table.

As he searches for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend, Haruki Murakami's protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread in which he collides with call girls; plays chaperone to a lovely teenaged psychic; and receives cryptic instructions from a shabby but oracular Sheep Man. Dance Dance Dance is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the cultural Cuisinart that is contemporary Japan, a place where everything that is not up for sale is up for grabs.

Review:  If you like Japanese fiction then it's kind of undoubted that you will have heard of Haruki Murakami, the hugely popular author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore and other such novels.  He left the country after the huge success of his most popular novel, Norwegian Wood, when he became a national celebrity.  Most amusingly, the head of a newspaper claimed that "Haruki Murakami has escaped from Japan!"   This is enough to make me want to read his work.

Dance Dance Dance is, largely, a very confusing book. It's wildly chaotic, some characters and setting appearing for know apparent reason, and seemingly the un-named narrator already knows about.  The Dolphin Hotel, for instance.  Did I miss something there?  For a lot of the book I was expecting some sort of flashback to sort of explain everything, but largely most of it remained unexplained, and kind of threw the reader in at the deep end.  Kiki, for instance.  She was one of the most important characters in the book, but it was like, "this is Kiki, a high-class prostitute  that the narrator was once in love with.  She's disappeared".  Still, I think it was this air of mystery about her that made her so intriguing.  Who was she?  Why did she vanish?

Ditto the Sheep Man. The man who apparently ties everything together and connects thoughts and people.  He serves as a switchboard of sorts. Amusingly, the sheep man stars on the German cover , (the German title translates as Dance with the Sheep Man) although in the book he is actually described as an old man wrapped in some sheepskin, I prefer the idea of a sheep wearing human clothes.  Who wouldn't?  Anyway, I love the Sheep Man mostly for his whole "Yougottadance. Aslongasthemusicplays. Yougotta dance. Don'teventhinkwhy" speech, which is to my mind the Japanese "She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl." It's one of those quotes that there are about three different versions of in the Goodreads Quotes section.  With reason, I suppose.

And there are, of course, a multitude of other exciting characters: Yuki, a psychic thirteen-year-old and one of my favourite characters in the book for her frankness, Yumiyoshi, a constantly uptight hotel receptionist, and Gotanda, a divorced actor so handsome he's forever doomed to play dentists or teachers in teen romance movies. Oh, and look out for Yuki's father, Hiraku Makimura.  Stare at his name long enough and you'll get it.

The narrator is un-named throughout the book.  Still, his first-person voice seems very direct, as if he's speaking right to the reader, and how could you not root for him as he traverses across the far side of the world from Tokyo to Hokkaido to Hawai'i in his attempt to see how everything ties together?  He's humorous, realistic and quietly observant of the chaotic advanced capitalism of 1980s Japan, but more than anything he's just an ordinary divorced thirty-something trying to hold everything together.  His voice is realistic, slightly cynical and darkly humorous; it's very believable, mostly because he is nothing special. Until, that is, the string of encounters that throw him, the sheep-man and the other main characters together in the mysterious hotel room.  Still, aside from that obvious fact he is totally, 100%, undeniably ordinary.

And the plot itself is well-paced. I don't read mystery novels very often, mostly because I can't stand all the tension of the unanswered questions.  Maybe it's just me being unfortunate and reading the wrong stuff, but in the mystery novels I read the secrets either all get answered all at once in one big, life-changing scene or else they ask more questions than they answer (*cough* A Series of Unfortune Events *coughcough*).  But Dance Dance Dance is very engaging in how the author strings the reader along in a paperchase of murder, mystery and humour, slowly revealing things bit by bit.

The ending.  Hmm.  The ending, the ending, the ending.  I can't tell whether or not I liked it, actually.  One one hand it seemed like a nice enough stopping point, but it's clear that the narrator's search doesn't end there, and that he could spend his whole life traversing the globe trying to find answers to the multitude of questions left unanswered at the end of the book.  On the other hand, it was a little disappointing that the ending was so inconclusive.  Also, the penultimate scene in the book got on my nerves somewhat, because it seemed kind of "and then Harry woke up in the cupboard under the stairs and it was all a dream".  Let me say before you rip your hair out and scream "Oh my word she hasjust given away the ending", let me assure you that it was not all a dream.  However, mostly because so much of the book seems to surreal, I call into question how much of it was actually real (the obvious answer being none of it because it's fiction), and how much of it was just a figment of the narrator's imagination. The mind boggles, but such is the brilliantness, such is the author's writing that you have to doubt what really happens and what doesn't.

In three words: chaotic, surreal, engaging.
Reccomended for: Murakami fans old and new.
Rating: 5.

Review: Paper Towns by John Green

Dear Blog,
I finished Paper Towns this afternoon.  I know that the picture is the US edition as opposed to the UK one, but I couldn't find a good-quality image of the right size of the sceptr'd isle edition.  No matter.

Summary (from Goodreads): When Margo Roth Spiegelman beckons Quentin Jacobsen in the middle of the night—dressed like a ninja and plotting an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows her. Margo’s always planned extravagantly, and, until now, she’s always planned solo. After a lifetime of loving Margo from afar, things are finally looking up for Q . . . until day breaks and she has vanished. Always an enigma, Margo has now become a mystery. But there are clues. And they’re for Q.

Review: I read Looking for Alaska about a  month ago and completely fell in love with it, and a couple of days after finishing it I ordered Paper Towns off Amazon.  I haven't had a chance to read it since then, but decided to read it now so that it didn't just blend into my bookshelf and not read for another two and a half years, à la Artemis Fowl and Many Waters (neither of which I've actually read yet).  Although, John Green's writing is too good to put off from reading for very long.

Paper Towns is similar to Looking for Alaska in many ways.  Margo and Alaska are kind of alike, just because they're clever and worldly and mysterious.  There's one scene on page 77/78 where Q is describing Margo which seems almost identical to the "In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla, and on that thin-mooned night I could see little more than her silhouette" scene in Alaska.  But I don't really care because it's so beautiful and well-written (as was the "she was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing.  She was a girl" part in Paper Towns)  And Miles and Quentin had similar characteristics, too, but all these similarities matter not because all these people are awesome-  the sort of people you wish would just jump off the page. I certainly wish that Margot would open my bedroom window one night and take me on awesome all-night escapades.  Too bad that stories are fiction, however realistic the characters may seem.  But that's how you know that characters are truly great, I guess.  Not only do you belive they could be real but you want them to be. 

Paper Towns has that brilliant mix of being funny and making you think.  It's the sort of book where you don't want to just add a couple of your favourite sentences to your Favourite Quote section on Goodreads, but the whole thing.  Indeed, as well as being deep and philosophical in a John Green sort of way, parts of it are hysterically funny.  Parts of it are certainly rude.  Generally it's both at the same time *sigh*. Boy humour...what more can I say?  Anyway, at some parts I was laughing so hard my little sister was giving me weird looks and asking if I was okay.  Which I was.
I don't tend to read mystery novels, but this is more than anything else a mystery and, like any good one, keeps you guessing.  Although I did get a bit annoyed about two thirds of the way into the book when we knew that Margo was in a paper town but not exactly where.  So that sort of got on my nerves because Q didn't actually get on the road until part 3 (to my mind the best part of the book).

I'm not really sure what to make of the ending, which I won't reveal because it will wreck the whole book.  Was it right?  Was it dissapointed?  I can't really tell, and will probably have to think it over for a few days before I come to any conclusions.  

Summary: excellent no matter what you make of the ending. Funny, thoughtful, exciting, rude, and absolutely awesome.  Rating: 4/5.