Summer Books #5: Dance Dance Dance

Everyone has their own set of little anecdotes - cocktail party patter, clever one-liners and quips that can be recycled over and over, to be replaced seasonally. Personal talking points, in a way.

The unnamed protagonist of Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance has one of these talking points that he’s particularly proud of, which he brings up again and again when asked about his job as a freelance writer.

Well, somebody’s got to write these things. And the same can be said for collecting garbage and shoveling snow. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, a job’s a job.

For three and a half years, I’d been making this kind of contribution to society. Shoveling snow. You know, cultural snow.

That the narrator so transparently recycles the “cultural snow” line was terribly endearing to me. It reinforces the down to earth and surprisingly accessible nature of Murakami’s protagonists - despite the often bizarre circumstances they find themselves in, they’re really pretty normal, slightly disaffected, people. Much like Kurt Vonnegut, Murakami excels when it comes to the atmospheric internal monologue.

What happens in the book? The loner narrator is searching for a lost love. More mysteries are uncovered than solved. Odd, supernatural things occur, but are presented as fairly unremarkable. More than anything, it’s about how nice it can be when confused, lonely people fall into serendipitous friendships, and manage to muster the strength to take these relationships at face value and simply enjoy them.

Dance Dance Dance: ****/5

Up next: Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.
Click here for the index of past reviews.