Dance Dance Dance
by Cun Shang Chun Shu · first published 2011
50% recommend40% neutral10% critical
Why HN recommends it
Surreal, Chandler-tinged mystery by Murakami with a bizarre, dreamlike atmosphere; fans single it out as a favorite in his work and suit readers who enjoy his strange, wry style and the Sheep Man sequence.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…an English translation of Pinball, 1973 in a bookshop there. It was a Kodansha imprint, for English learners I think. Anyway, I'd already read a number of Murakami books by that time (Wild Sheep Chase, Dance, Dance, Dance and Wind-up Bird Chronicle), and enjoyed them so I snapped it up. It was an ok read but far from his best (which for me, still remains Wind-up Bird Chronicle). Later, I researched that Kodansha edition…
on “Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became a Novelist” ↗I own pretty much everything Murakami has ever written, including his non-fiction, and while I enjoy them all, Dance Dance Dance might be my favorite. I also never see anyone recommend it, which seems odd to me. An old hotel elevator that opens to a void where the Sheep Man waits for you. It's utterly bizarre. I love it. Norwegian…
on “Japanese Writing After Murakami” ↗…me to pick a book up. I doesn't matter what was blurbed, but gives the idea that the book is something adjacent to ideas and topics and style of Gibson. Actually, the quote on the cover of Murakami's Dance Dance Dance lead me to consider, and buy the book: "If Raymond Chandler had lived long enough to see Blade Runner, he might have written something like Dance Dance Dance" -- The Observer. Now, I don't think that's…
on “Beware of Book Blurbs” ↗…a bookshelf somewhere. My wife is a big Murakami fan and I've read almost all of them. I will make that the next one on my fiction reading list, thanks! I particularly enjoyed A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance, whereas my wife loves Kafka on the Shore (which I didn't like). Funny that...
on “Haruki Murakami: The Moment I Became a Novelist” ↗Long time Murakami fun here, have read all his books and recently re-read the Rat Trilogy (Wild Sing + Pinball, A Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance). I agree that there is indeed repetitiveness in his most recent work but I still find a lot of his work insightful and somewhat relatable. One of the best imo ranking of his work can be found in [0]. [0]https://www.reddit.com/r/murakami/comments/3q28p4/to_those_w...
on “Haruki Murakami and the Scarcity of Serious Thought” ↗…its over-the-top portrayals of the most infantile and socially dysfunctional aspects of the tech start-up culture are eerily on the mark. Six years later, as a code monkey, I read a book about Japan, "Dance Dance Dance" by Haruki Murakami - whose early 90's Tokyo of excess parallels the surrealness of Silicon Valley. The male protagonist is a disaffected Japanese advertising executive in his late 20's who have lost…
on “The Children of Silicon Valley” ↗…divorced. To say that the plots of any of his books have exactly the same plot would be a huge mischaracterization, though. The only two books that are even vaguely similar are Wind-Up and the earlier Dance Dance Dance (the last part of a quadrilogy about the "Sheep Man"); the latter feels a lot like a preliminary sketch for the vastly superior Wind-Up, in particular the fascination about hotel rooms and shared dreams.…
on “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2014” ↗It's worth warning that Dance Dance Dance is a sequel to his Rat trilogy (which ends with A Wild Sheep Chase, which for many years was the only in the trilogy available in English). It makes references to characters and events in those books.…
on “Japanese Writing After Murakami” ↗Haruki Murakami's novel 'Dance Dance Dance' has a character who is in a similar situation. He's a movie star who because of circumstances related to his divorce has acquired a stunning amount of debt. So most of his income goes into covering this…
on “Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?” ↗…structural clue. It occurs in the 'Hear the Wind Sing', the first book of the Sheep Trilogy, which ends in the much-recommended 'A Wild Sheep Chase' (technically it was later followed with a 4th book in 'Dance, Dance, Dance' so it's a 4-book trilogy). In the very beginning of the 'Hear the Wind Sing' there is a small unassuming line: 'This story begins on August 8, 1970, and ends eighteen days later — in other words, on…
on “The Intricate Translation Process for a Murakami Novel” ↗…Wonderland first - I thought it stepped away from some of his recurring themes but still a good example of his style. Also a quicker read. He has a few anthologies might be good intros as well - I read two, Dance, Dance, Dance and The Elephant Also Vanishes, but I think he’s got some others. Along the lines of magical realism, Kurt Vonnegut seems like a great recommendation too. His books incorporate a bit more sci-fi - Galapagos,…
on “Ask HN: Sci-fi recommendations by non-western authors?” ↗