Dance, Dance, Dance

I started reading Dance, Dance, Dance while dog and house sitting for a friend in Williamsburg. It was the Holidays and I was looking for something light and engaging to while away the days with. I had no idea this book would be so captivating. Her copy was creased and dog eared, which was surprising because I feel like 400 page books like this don’t always get finished. I had written Murakami off after I put down Norwegian Wood which I had started while in India a few years ago. I remember its pace being very languid and describing a beautiful girl in summer light, it was nice but was not at the same momentum as the excitement of my trip. I ended up reading the classic sci-fi escapade DUNE which I had picked up at the same free book exchange shelf at a cafe in Goa.
Dance, Dance, Dance echoes Hesse’s Steppenwolf in the narrator’s passages into Hall of Mirrors surrealism. The plot and characters are solid but the landscape itself is fluid, it is the flickering backgrounds that punctuate the plot and make for an intricate and captivating experience. There is nothing unsure about it, you are lead right through the story, there is no uncertainty of which world we are in—Murakami allows you to be certain in the uncertain, it is beautifully executed.
Murakami’s novel is about his characters’ constellating but it is also about the space in which they revolve. There is a strong sense of place in every moment of the story, and it gets extremely subtle how both the characters and the places begin to dissolve into another super-reality. We are familiarized with a place, the old Dolphin Hotel, and then we experience it’s replacement by the Modern L’Hotel Dauphin. The mystery begins as narrator tries to unfold the story behind the deal. It is out of longing for the familiar and for the real. The old Dolphin Hotel was one of those joints run by disgruntled but real characters. The type of place you can rely on. Much of the book is a yearning for the authentic and the reliable.
When the narrator first describes the now-extinct Dolphin Hotel with it’s familiar and comforting worn-in fixtures I could relate to the nostalgia of a place loved and lost. There are places that shaped who I was, not only by the experiences that happened inside, but by the personality of the whole place. Murakami loves our ability to feel a place like that, to know it’s atmosphere, it’s smell, and he goes one step farther to prepose those places not only resonate with our inner essence, they are projected from our essence—they are the rooms of the soul, the Hotels of our hearts.

The Narrator’s dance through these locations and situations inspires us to undertake our own dance. In the end their is no answer but only the afterglow of the enchanting movement through the inexplicable play of life.