Haruki Murakami - Dance Dance Dance

DANCE DANCE DANCE

An entertaining mix of modern sci-fi, nail-biting suspense, and ancient myth ... a sometimes funny, sometimes sinister mystery spoof... [that] also aims

at contemporary human concerns. Chicago Tribune

The plot is addictive. Detroit Free Press

There are novelists who dare to imagine the future, but none is as scrupulously, amusingly up-to-the-minute as ... Murakami. Newsday

[Dance Dance Dance] has the fascination of a well-written detective story combined with a surreal dream narrative... full of appealing, welldeveloped characters.

Philadelphia Inquirer

A world-class writer who... takes big risks.... If Murakami is the voice of a generation, then it is the genera-tion of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

Washington Post Book World

All the hallmarks of Murakami's greatness are here: restless and sensitive characters, disturbing shifts into altered reality, silky smooth turns of phrase and a narrative with all the momentum of a roller-coaster.... This is the sort of page-turner [Mishima] might have written. Publishers Weekly

[Murakami's] writing injects the rock 'n' roll of everyday language into the exquisite silences of Japanese literary prose. Harper's Bazaar

One of the most exciting new writers to appear on the inter-national scene. USA Today

HARUKI MURAKAMI

DANCE DANCE DANCE

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Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and grew up in Kobe. He is the author of A Wild Sheep Chase; Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; and The Elephant Vanishes. He lives with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

books by HARUKI MURAKAMI

South of the Border, West of the Sun

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Dance Dance Dance

The Elephant Vanishes

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

A Wild Sheep Chase

a novel by

translated by Alfred Birnbaum

Vintage International 3-4

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 1995

Copyright 1994 by Kodansha International Ltd.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Originally published in Japanese under the title Dansu Dansu Dansu by Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo, in 1988. This translation first published in the United States in hardcover by Kodansha America, Inc., New York, in 1994. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murakami, Haruki, 1949-[ Dansu dansu dansu. English ] Dance dance dance : a novel / by Haruki Murakami: translated by Alfred Birnbaum. p. cm ISBN 0-679-75379-6

I. Birnbaum, Alfred. II. Title

PL856. U673D3613 1995

895.6'35-dc20 94-34713

Manufactured in the United States of America 13579886420

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 indifferentdusty 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.

The Dolphin Hotel is a real hotel. It actually exists in a so-so section of Sapporo. Once, a few years back, I spent a week there. No,

let me get that straight. How many years ago was it? Four. Or more precisely, four and a half. I was still in my twenties. I checked into the Dolphin Hotel with a woman I was living with. She'd chosen the place. This is where we're staying, was what she said. If it hadn't been for her, I doubt I'd ever have set foot in the place. It was a tiny dump of a hotel. In the whole time we were there, I don't know if we saw another paying customer. There were a couple of characters milling around the lobby, but who knows if they were staying there? A few keys were always missing from the board behind the front desk, so I guess there were other hotel guests. Though not too many. I mean, really, you hang out a hotel sign somewhere in a major city, put a phone number in the business listings, it stands to reason you're not going to go entirely without cus-tomers. But granting there were other customers besides our-selves, they were awfully quiet. We never heard a sound from them, hardly saw a sign of their presencewith the exception of the arrangement of the keys on the board that changed slightly each day. Were they like shadows creeping along the walls of the corridors, holding their breath? Occasionally we'd hear the dull rattling of the elevator, but when it stopped the oppressive silence bore down once more.

A mysterious hotel.

What it reminded me of was a biological dead end. A ge-netic retrogression. A freak accident of nature that stranded some organism up the wrong path without a way back. Evo-lutionary vector eliminated, orphaned life-form left cowering behind the curtain of history, in The Land That Time Forgot. And through no fault of anyone. No one to blame, no one to save it. The hotel should never have been built where it was. That was the first mistake, and everything got worse from there. Like a button on a shirt buttoned wrong, every attempt to correct things led to yet another finenot to say elegant mess. No detail seemed right. Look at anything in the place and you'd find yourself tilting your head a few degrees. Not enough to cause you any real harm, nor enough to seem par-ticularly odd. Who knows? You might get used

to this slant on things (but if you did, you'd never be able to view the world again without holding your head out of true). That was the Dolphin Hotel. Normalness, it lacked. Con-fusion piled on confusion until the saturation point was reached, destined in the not-too-distant future to be swal-lowed in the vortex of time. Anyone could recognize that at a glance. A pathetic place, woebegone as a three-legged black dog drenched in December rain. Sad hotels existed every-where, to be sure, but the Dolphin was in a class of its own. The Dolphin Hotel was conceptually sorry. The Dolphin Hotel was tragic.