All you get is high-brow slop. Review on Dance, Dance, Dance - Haruki Murakami

A noir mystery that has as its premise, urban existential angst. If reality bores/annoys you and you veer towards living in your head, it has infinite appeal. It’s wonderful, credible, even  laudable, escapist fare. I have often spent contented hours worshipping at this altar. When Sartre says: hell is, other people at breakfast, you have an epiphany – you are not alone. The need for solitude, the desire to take a personal and naturally dim view of the world around you and still feel good about life – all this the book does for you. It IS chicken soup for the soul.

So when the critic on the back cover gasps that Haruki Murakami makes him go weak-kneed with admiration, you pick up Dance, Dance, Dance, read the first few pages and whole-heartedly agree. Back home however, the wonder rapidly deteriorates. And you can’t believe that instead of marveling at the grand architecture, it is the scaffolding that is laid bare. The construction of the book, every tool and its purpose becomes unappetizingly clear. In any case you read through it. It has its moments.  The story starts promisingly and ends very well too. But the entire middle gets you frowning.

It has everything an intellectual potboiler ought to  - whimsy, wit, pithy observations on culture, and is often extremely quotable. This book also gives an insight into modern Japanese culture and its preoccupations which are so decidedly urban. The protagonist, a 34-year old divorcee whose wife has run off with his friend, is an interesting person. In his words, he “shovels snow”. That is he does the sort of work that is essential, though unremarkable. Even if, as in his case, it is “cultural snow” that he shovels. He is a freelance writer, content-writing for corporates. The hero cooks a mean meal  (and the descriptions of his utterly classy meals have been enough to make me hunt down Japanese restaurants in Mumbai). He is only semi-serious about his self-deprecatory observations on fashion though. It is clearly of real interest – in urban society that is so swamped by the media’s aspirational consumerist attitudes that is inevitable. I just didn’t think it is something a rebel-against-the-system would acknowledge. Isn’t the media itself the establishment, the enemy? He also revers American music and is impressively familiar with it. Fine, that’s so cool too.

The most important character in the book is a hotel – the Dolphin hotel – which becomes the witness to all the surreal searchings of the protagonist. Which is of course a wonderful concept. The problem is never with the concepts – all very clever and apt. It is with the truth that these concepts are supposed to convey and which they just don’t. They are simply contrived. All the deliberation being so clear, you end up smirking at much of the ohsobrilliant posturing.

The story with its hip attitude, lacks an important element – compassion. All the characters initially excite your interest and then just fizzle out. There’s Yumiyoshi, the receptionist at the hotel; Kiki for whom he is searching and who has the potential to give him a fresh start; Gotanda the handsome actor and the hero’s batchmate and Yuki – the teenager who is perhaps the most important one. It’s one thing to take a thirteen year old and make her the object of interest of our middle-aged hero. But she receives absolutely no empathy from the writer. She gets to be the point of reflection on such things as lost youth and innocence and passion. In his attempt at getting over his arrested development, she comes in handy. So, he gets to chat up this beautiful(very) 13-year-old about training bras and periods – heaven clearly for the genteel intellectual of refined feelings.

The news about Japanese mens fascination for children in school uniforms is apparently true, at least for our protagonist. But the school uniform is perhaps too crass. So at some point she becomes a point of reference for that other thing about adolescence – individual expression. Her sensibilities are such that school would be a torment for her. She can blossom into adulthood on her “own” terms. While all this happens apparently with Yuki’s uniqueness in mind and is therefore praiseworthy, the fact is she never comes into her own in the story. Our middle-aged hero is the fulcrum – she is never given the dignity of being a creature independent of his own preoccupations. For all his eloquently expressed “understanding” of her difficult age, Yuki is no more than a prop in this story. Even as he holds forth to her mother on what it is that Yuki needs etc, he himself seems rather shallow towards her. Her lolitaesque presence is the only thing that is real to him – this is the tantalizing aspect which is lucid even as it stays predictably and politically correct.

Murakami’s perspective is urban and edgy yes . It is also male – not in its aggression but in its romanticizing of violence. Besides the wonderful insight into Japan, this is actually the only other honest, interesting aspect of the book. I obviously made a mistake by picking this one as my first Murakami. Now it will be a while before I read his other works.

Otherwise as I closed the book, I wished Govinda would lead this determinedly confused soul by the shoulder and sing earnestly: “aao sikhaoon, tumhe ande ka funda”. A far more genuine take on life, the universe and everything.