Like other books in my library, this came to me from a trip I'd taken to an independent bookstore in Brooklyn and looked for something to get. It almost sounds like I was keeping indie bookstores open myself through patronage, but that's just silly. I probably visited a handful of indie stores between downtown Brooklyn and Greenwich Village, and tried to make purchases when I had the money and found something I wanted. well, I guess the I picked up Vineland at the place on like 35th across from that Adorama store, and the used M&D...somewhere similar, I'm pretty sure.
Anyway I digress, and neither of those is Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami. This is not the first Murakami book I read, so I was familiar with his work, and by "familiar", I mean "ape-shit crazy for".
If you've never read any Murakami, I beg you to check him out, and this book is fine to start with, or, another book that will show up here sometime soon, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the end of the World is another great first book to jump into Murakami's inventive worlds.
Murakami, while attending university in Tokyo, decided instead of the profession he was heading into (or might've already been in--I'm a little fuzzy on the exact details) that he wanted to open a Jazz club. And he did. He ran a successful Tokyo Jazz club for a few years. Then, while watching a baseball game, he decided he wanted to be a writer. And he then became a writer. Later on, while not abandoning writing like he did his jazz club, he decided he wanted to be a runner, and is now a successful marathon racer. He quit smoking in his late forties to help with his running...that's the kind of dude Haruki Murakami is.
His fiction is playful and funny and full of weird things you'd think you'd only see in late night sci-fi movies, but fully make sense in the world you're reading. Here's an example of a Murakami short fiction piece I read in the New Yorker: a lady is having a hard time remembering her name, and eventually she's lead to a laboratory where she meets the talking monkey who's been stealing tiny nameplates from people, causing them to become forgetful of their own identities. Silly monkey.
In Dance Dance Dance the protagonist finds himself walking through a scuzzy part of town, and remembers having been there with a girl before, and for nostalgia's sake decides to check out the seedy motel they stayed in that one passionate night, the old Dolphin Hotel. When he makes the turn to street that has the place he can't believe it. Instead of the run-down shambles he finds a brand new and shiny high-rise hotel, bright with lights and flush with cash, but sill named the Dolphin (they might use the French Dauphine, though).
Stunned, he eventually goes up to a certain floor, and when the elevator door opens, he's swallowed by blackness. The floor is pitch black and the air has some character, and at some point he meets the Goat Man and shit gets weird.
I usually consider my own fiction writing style to be a unit sphere nestled about the origin with one axis being Thomas Pynchon, the second axis being Denis Johnson, and the third axis being Murakami.
Murakami's ease of storytelling about weird science-y phenomena, and his confidence and ability to craft stories in which those things just happen, are the things from which I draw. If anything qualifies for sci-lit as opposed to sci-fi, it would have to be Haruki...but even then, it's more than that.
Above all, it's fun to read. I can't say that about all the stuff I've read, even by those writers I really enjoy and try to emulate.
Also, there's another Japanese writer who has made strides in America who's named Murakami, but this other gentleman is Ryu. Ryu Murakami is also good, but in the same way that Haruki is.
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