Dance Dance Dance

The passage that made me fall in love with his works.

Excerpt from Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel. In these dreams, I'm there,
implicated in some kind of ongoing circumstance. All indications
are that I belong to this dream continuity.

The Dolphin Hotel is distorted, much too narrow. It seems more
like a long, covered bridge. A bridge stretching endlessly through
time. And there I am, in the middle of it. Someone else is there too,
crying.

The hotel envelops me. I can feel its pulse, its heat. In dreams, I
am part of the hotel.

I wake up, but where? I don't just think this, I actually voice the
question to myself: «Where am I?» As if I didn't know: I'm here. In
my life. A feature of the world that is my existence. Not that I particularly
recall ever having approved these matters, this condition,
this state of affairs in which I feature. There might be a woman
sleeping next to me. More often, I'm alone. Just me and the expressway
that runs right next to my apartment and, bedside, a glass
(five millimeters of whiskey still in it) and the malicious — no, make
that indifferent—dusty morning light. Sometimes it's raining. If it is,
I'll just stay in bed. And if there's whiskey still left in the glass, I'll
drink it. And I'll look at the raindrops dripping from the eaves, and
I'll think about the Dolphin Hotel. Maybe I'll stretch, nice and slow.
Enough for me to be sure I'm myself and not part of something else.
Yet I'll remember the feel of the dream. So much that I swear I can
reach out and touch it, and the whole of that something that includes
me will move. If I strain my ears, I can hear the slow, cautious
sequence of play take place, like droplets in an intricate water
puzzle falling, step upon step, one after the other. I listen carefully.
That's when I hear someone softly, almost imperceptibly, weeping.
A sobbing from somewhere in the darkness. Someone is crying for
me.

Why I like Murakami

A COLLEAGUE AT WORK asked me why I liked reading Murakami.

I was poring over A Wild Sheep Chase - happily, the last book by Japanese author Haruki Murakami which I have not read.

His ability to see through contemporary, day-to-day events, crystallising the abject loneliness of individuals, I said.

His characters have a precious interiority, which I love the most about a writer. I find interiority hard to achieve in a character, without sounding self-centred and indulgent, or even plodding.

They border on the surreal and fantastical - yet he's melded that with the real, everyday dogfest of life.

I disovered Murakami late in life. It was in the university classroom during Poetry, when the lecturer yanked out a passage from Dance Dance Dance. It's easily my favourite of his works - hard to say whether it's because it's the best, or because it's a sentimental bridge to My First Murakami Encounter.

Even later in life - just right now - I discovered that Dance Dance Dance is the sequel to Wild Sheep Chase. In the same way that Murakami's writing is off-kilter and yet straight-to-the-nose, I guess I got it the right way wrong.

There is this heady straightness to everything, in his writing. This optimistic hopelessness that endears.

Reading Murakami is like reading the Book of Ecclesiastes.

There is nothing new under the sun; whatever we're doing now has been done before. But we do it anyway. We eat, sleep, shit, work, go home, and do it all over again the next day.

Why?

What are we looking for?

******************

I really like Kinokuniya. It's been a long time. 

H. and I paid the bookstore a visit yesterday. It was a wonderful, deliciously slow day. We took a day off to have brunch, chat, browse through books, have tea with J., buy a belt.

The atmosphere at Kinokuniya is different from Borders. I like the white clarity of space, the book ladders, and the smell of Kinokuniya. The books give off a chocolatey warmth that's comforting.

So I bought Wild Sheep Chase, a cookbook by Jamie Oliver: Ministry of Food, and a two-year membership to Kinokuniya.