"Donna Rifkind - Another Wild Chase" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murakami Haruki)
Donna Rifkind - Another Wild Chase
Donna
Rifkind
Another Wild Chase
January 2 1994, The New York Times
Book Review
DANCE DANCE DANCE By Haruki Murakami.
Translated by Alfred Birnbaum. 393 pp. New York: Kodansha
International.
The unnamed male
narrator of Haruki Murakami's latest book, Dance Dance Dance -- his
fourth to be published in this country -- is 34 years old and divorced, drives a
used Subaru, works in public relations, eats at McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts,
listens to Sam Cooke and idolizes Clint Eastwood. That he is not American but an
ordinary citizen of Tokyo confirms much that we already suspected about
contemporary urban Japan and shows that Mr. Murakami remains a member of what
might be called the "think globally, write locally" school of international
fiction.
Dance Dance Dance
continues the tale of the cynical but sensitive loner who first appeared in A
Wild Sheep Chase (published here in 1989), a book with so great a stylistic
debt to Raymond Chandler that one critic renamed it The Big Sheep. In it,
the narrator meets a woman with bewitchingly erotic ears who accompanies him to
the snowy northern city of Sapporo in pursuit of a supernaturally powerful sheep
with a brown star on its back. That novel managed to balance a graceful
ethereality with the noir world-weariness of its narrator: Philip Marlowe meets
the Floating World. If only Dance Dance Dance were as light on its
feet.
It is four years later,
and our narrator is back in Tokyo and once again alone, the magnificent-eared
woman having disappeared. Yet in his dream the narrator hears her weeping, which
troubles him enough to take time off from his meaningless public relations work
("What I did was shovel cultural snow") to try to find her. So off he jets to
the setting of his earlier adventures: the decrepit Dolphin Hotel in a seedy
section of Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido.
He arrives to find the
old structure gone, replaced by a glass-and-steel luxury hotel. The
dream-haunting woman never appears, but others claim his attention: a hotel
receptionist named Miss Yumiyoshi, a spoiled but neglected teen-ager named Yuki
and a charming young prostitute called Mei.
When Mei is found
murdered, the plot follows a blueprint -- part detective story, part science
fiction -- similar to the one in A Wild Sheep Chase. These characters and
others, including Gotanda, a former school chum of the narrator who is now a
famous movie star, circle suspiciously around the mystery of Mei's death as the
narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with finding her
killer.
The hunt takes him back
and forth several times from Sapporo to Tokyo, even preoccupying him on a
vacation to the foreign shores of Honolulu. When he approaches the murder
mystery's core, questions about himself are revealed as well: For whom is the
woman in his dreams weeping? What does it mean when his spiritual guide from
A Wild Sheep Chase, a disheveled extraterrestrial called the Sheep Man,
reappears and tells him to keep dancing "as long as the music
plays"?
Some of the novel's best
passages are comic: Gotanda's charisma in a junior high school science class was
so great that "if he lit a Bunsen burner with those graceful hands of his, it
was like the opening ceremonies of the Olympics." Others are poetic: of a
twilight walk through Tokyo, the narrator writes, "From the top of the hill, I
could see the neon signs coming on as the dark-suited masses of salarymen
crossed the intersection like instinct-blinded salmon."
But despite the discrete
excellence of such passages and the generally skillful translation of Alfred
Birnbaum, the book never quite decides what it wants to be. At times it reaches
for the urbane whimsicality of Mr. Murakami's earlier novel, while elsewhere it
attempts to be a more serious investigation into the depths of human identity.
Knocked off balance by such vacillation, Dance Dance Dance stumbles where
it ought to glide.
Donna Rifkind - Another Wild Chase
Donna
Rifkind
Another Wild Chase
January 2 1994, The New York Times
Book Review
DANCE DANCE DANCE By Haruki Murakami.
Translated by Alfred Birnbaum. 393 pp. New York: Kodansha
International.
The unnamed male
narrator of Haruki Murakami's latest book, Dance Dance Dance -- his
fourth to be published in this country -- is 34 years old and divorced, drives a
used Subaru, works in public relations, eats at McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts,
listens to Sam Cooke and idolizes Clint Eastwood. That he is not American but an
ordinary citizen of Tokyo confirms much that we already suspected about
contemporary urban Japan and shows that Mr. Murakami remains a member of what
might be called the "think globally, write locally" school of international
fiction.
Dance Dance Dance
continues the tale of the cynical but sensitive loner who first appeared in A
Wild Sheep Chase (published here in 1989), a book with so great a stylistic
debt to Raymond Chandler that one critic renamed it The Big Sheep. In it,
the narrator meets a woman with bewitchingly erotic ears who accompanies him to
the snowy northern city of Sapporo in pursuit of a supernaturally powerful sheep
with a brown star on its back. That novel managed to balance a graceful
ethereality with the noir world-weariness of its narrator: Philip Marlowe meets
the Floating World. If only Dance Dance Dance were as light on its
feet.
It is four years later,
and our narrator is back in Tokyo and once again alone, the magnificent-eared
woman having disappeared. Yet in his dream the narrator hears her weeping, which
troubles him enough to take time off from his meaningless public relations work
("What I did was shovel cultural snow") to try to find her. So off he jets to
the setting of his earlier adventures: the decrepit Dolphin Hotel in a seedy
section of Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido.
He arrives to find the
old structure gone, replaced by a glass-and-steel luxury hotel. The
dream-haunting woman never appears, but others claim his attention: a hotel
receptionist named Miss Yumiyoshi, a spoiled but neglected teen-ager named Yuki
and a charming young prostitute called Mei.
When Mei is found
murdered, the plot follows a blueprint -- part detective story, part science
fiction -- similar to the one in A Wild Sheep Chase. These characters and
others, including Gotanda, a former school chum of the narrator who is now a
famous movie star, circle suspiciously around the mystery of Mei's death as the
narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with finding her
killer.
The hunt takes him back
and forth several times from Sapporo to Tokyo, even preoccupying him on a
vacation to the foreign shores of Honolulu. When he approaches the murder
mystery's core, questions about himself are revealed as well: For whom is the
woman in his dreams weeping? What does it mean when his spiritual guide from
A Wild Sheep Chase, a disheveled extraterrestrial called the Sheep Man,
reappears and tells him to keep dancing "as long as the music
plays"?
Some of the novel's best
passages are comic: Gotanda's charisma in a junior high school science class was
so great that "if he lit a Bunsen burner with those graceful hands of his, it
was like the opening ceremonies of the Olympics." Others are poetic: of a
twilight walk through Tokyo, the narrator writes, "From the top of the hill, I
could see the neon signs coming on as the dark-suited masses of salarymen
crossed the intersection like instinct-blinded salmon."
But despite the discrete
excellence of such passages and the generally skillful translation of Alfred
Birnbaum, the book never quite decides what it wants to be. At times it reaches
for the urbane whimsicality of Mr. Murakami's earlier novel, while elsewhere it
attempts to be a more serious investigation into the depths of human identity.
Knocked off balance by such vacillation, Dance Dance Dance stumbles where
it ought to glide.
|