Then a little past noon, the phone rang.

“How’s it going?” It was Yuki.

“Okay.”

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Thinking about lunch. Smoked salmon with pedigreed lettuce and razor-sharp slices of onion that have been soaked in ice water, brushed with horseradish and mustard, served on French butter rolls baked in the hot ovens of Kinokuniya. A sandwich made in heaven!”

“It sounds okay.”

“It’s not okay. It’s nothing less than uplifting. And if you don’t believe me, you can ask your local bee. You could also ask your friendly clover. They’ll tell you – it really is great.”

“What’s this bee and clover stuff? What’re you talking about?”

“Figure of speech.”

“You know,” said Yuki, “you ought to try growing up. I’m only thirteen, but even so I sometimes think you’re kind of dumb.”

The excerpt up above is from page 162 from Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami (a sequel to the author’s previous work, The Wild Sheep Chase, something that Murakami seems to want you to remember one second then forget about completely the next).

Murakami is a fascinating writer, but one who operates in a very Wittgenstein sort of way: What is there is almost as important as what is not there. What is there is typically bizarre exchanges, long drawn out scenes that never seem to end one moment, and then tasty little nuggets of scenes that fly by way too fast, an often lazy narrator who’s feeling left behind by the world, had a wife, a girlfriend, or a cat (and usually all three) leave him, then befriends a pre-pubescent girl who’s almost as much of an outsider of him while being wiser in her perspective of the world than he, then beds a hooker not only with a heart of gold but a special insight into dreamworlds and night crimes, loves old jazz and Beatles records, and spends excruciatingly long and excitingly large amounts of time preparing food or talking about the mundane little activities one can occupy oneself with in a solitary lifestyle. To him, making a salad and having some rice and drinking a few beers while staying in for the night and catching up on reading Kafka and listen to Nat King Cole may as well be storming the beaches of Normandy. What’s not there is gorgeous in the whole if not the pieces as you take a wonderfully unsettling journey into magical realism and dark little worlds that exist on top of ours but can only be seen when you turn off the lights. Fantastic stuff.

So here’s the thing about me: I pretty much always read two books at once. It’s just something I’ve typically always done, but to varying degrees in my life. When I was a kid, I was one of those super annoying kids (the smart ones), you know? I had two or three books going in my room at a time while having one book in the bathroom (everyone does that, so don’t front on me here, kids) that was I reading, and one in the living room waiting for me, along with one in my mom’s car, one in my dad’s car, and I was reading all of them off and on around the same time.

The other night I finished both of the books I was reading. My reading/literary intake for the past few months has been dismal, honestly. Embarrassingly slow, to be honest. One of the books, as you might’ve guessed, was Dance Dance Dance by Murakmi. His books are not too long or arduous of reads. They’re relatively simple with beautiful language (a skill of both Murakmi and his translators) that can be digested with the greatest of ease. But for some reason this book of his took me forever to read, but by no fault of the book or anything. In fact, it was at Murakmi’s usual high quality (I say that, but be warned: he’s just not for everyone).

It was probably because some of his books… well, they’re just meant to be read in periods of sustained, manageable depression. They just are. I started into what is basically a season in hell a few months back, right around the time I started reading Dance Dance Dance. Bad idea. Murakami isn’t your companion into the bad times, he’s for when you’re already there, I think. The metaphors work almost perfectly here since he’s obsessed with other worlds, metaphysical dream places that exist on top of the reality we know and kind of allow us to melt through when we’re emotionally lost or tender and float through these soft places…

To explain that better: Take the logic of the Island time travel wonkiness on Lost and filter it through a functioning sense of loneliness and a nice old record collection and a love for hookers, just subtract the tropical setting and anybody with guns and you’re closer to the mindset of your typical Murakami protagonist.

But I digress. If you ever think to yourself, “Man, I’ve been kind of down for a while…” then you should go pick up one of Murakami‘s longer books (see below). Personally, I’d suggest The Wind Up Bird Chronicle as a nice little introduction to those longer novels of his, a book for the veterans of non-dopey sad. It’s the book that Thom Yorke (doesn’t he just seem like he’d always be kind of depressed? At parties, DJing at bar mitzvahs, and the birth of his kids, etc.) was reading during the making of OK Computer if I remember my music trivia correctly (and I do). That’s not credentials by any means, but it’s an interesting insight into the mood of the thing, I think.

I mentioned his longer books up there, right? Last year for Peanut’s birthday, I gave her (it was last year, right, Peanut?) a copy of Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, a lovely little favorite of mine. Here is an excerpt from me trying to explain why in a letter to her: He tends to write two kinds of books. The first are these big, weird juggernauts of sadness and quirkiness and loneliness which seem like a lesson plan taught on situational metaphysics and quantum swinger parties, but transcribed from a mellow college class that you can only take in your dreams. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, an excellent book of his, is one of these such gorgeous oddities and one that I love. And then I mentioned the Thom Yorke bit because… well, I tend to repeat myself.

The second type of book that he tends to write, I continued to Peanut in the email, are these much smaller, more intimate books usually about a lonely protagonist/narrator who likes old jazz and Beatles records (see again how I repeat myself?) and exists mostly in the nighttime hours and ponders over his missed connections with women in the past and longs for the girl who got away. These smaller books are only shorter in content but certainly not slighter in quality and tend to be pure treatises on loneliness shot right into your vein. They miss out on a little of the technical wonder and bizarre dazzle of his larger books, but they’re still lovely ways to spend your time. And the book that I gave her (which I think she liked? Peanut?), Sputnik Sweetheart, was probably 2/3 the second time of book I described and 1/3 the first type.

My last little bit on Murakami, whom I shouldn’t neglect to mention is criticized heavily in his native Japan for his beyond blatant love for American pop culture (there’s a three page portion of the novel where the narrator ruminates on how stupid he thinks Genesis is for a band)(and a nice pit of post modern meta as the narrator meets his fictional double, Hiraku Makimura), is a bit of advice: Be patient when reading him. Dance Dance Dance is a psuedo-detective (in a kind of Phillip K. Dick manner, one of the cover blurbs asserted), but the protagonist moves at an almost glacial pace in solving this crime. You could say that he hunts down the murderer in question at the same speed in which OJ tracked down “the real killers.” The nameless protagonist of this novel makes The Dude look like Phillip Marlowe and Haruki Murakami is the Ben Gibbard of magical realism.

The other book, by the way, was Airframe by Michael Crichton. It’s from back when he was still good, but even still, it’s one of his softer “thrillers.” But it would make for excellent airport gift shop mass consumption, I’d wager.

Anyways, I posted a version of all of this earlier and asked for suggestions for something new to dive into reading next. Sure, I’ve got a massive stack of unread books piling up next to my bed, but I wanted something new. Something someone was passionate about, something they screamed at me, “You must read this right now!” And I got some great responses with good suggestions so I want to especially thank Lollipop and Bailey and Elvira for their suggestions and Murakami love.

Lykke Li “Dance Dance Dance” (mp3)

The Clientele “Bookshop Casanova” (mp3)

Mono “Ashes In The Snow” (mp3)

You can read the short story “A Shinagawa Monkey” by Murakami that appeared in The New Yorker here.

Some of the above pictures are from here and here and here’s an interesting bit on Takashi Murakami (no relation to Haruki or Ryu). And another.

You you can also read “Tony Takitani,” the short story on which the film is based.

And don’t forget to stop by Exorcising Ghosts, a really nice Haruki Murakami fansite.

A common theme in Murakami’s books is people who just vanish into thin air, as if they moved from this world into one of those mysterious other ones that can only exist parallel to one of his novels. Here’s 10 writers that departed in mysterious ways.

from pages 272-273 of Dance Dance Dance:

Yuki squinted and reached out to touch my cheek. Her fingertips were soft and smooth. She sniffed the air around me, her tiny nostrils swelling slightly. She gave me another long look. “You saw something, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“But you can’t say what. You can’t put it into words. Can’t explain, not to anyone. But I can see it.” She leaned over and grazed her cheek against mine. “Poor thing,” she said.

“How come?” I asked, laughing. There was no reason to laugh, but I couldn’t not laugh. “All things considered, I’m the most ordinary guy you could hope to find. So why do these weird things keep happening to me?”

“Yeah, why?” said Yuki. “Don’t look at me. I’m just a kid.  You’re the adult here.”

“True enough.”

“But I understand how you feel.”

“I don’t.”

“At times like this, adults need a drink.”