Haruki Murakami: Dance, Dance, Dance

By SHONAGH LINDSAY

A metaphysical whodunnit which twists in numerous directions all leading back to the narrator, Murakami's late-1980s novel is perfect fare for a long plane trip, which is where I consumed it, barely willing to interrupt its fast-track prose for the lacklustre meals.

Set in Hakodate and Tokyo in a time delineated as the "advanced anthill of capitalist society", the novel has as its protagonist an exceptionally introspective, 30-ish hack writer who describes his work as shovelling cultural snow - tedious but as necessary to capitalism as the waste it feeds off.

Divorced, living and working alone, he appears to float like an astronaut in urban Japan, aware of its vast unfolding emptiness but unable to get back to home base, until several things happen.

He meets 13-year-old Yuki, temporarily abandoned by her successful, self-absorbed mother; a young woman he is attracted to locates a space with which some disturbingly missing elements from his past seem to be connected; he makes a new friend of an old classmate - and before he knows it he is caught in the dance of life once again.

Part fable as well as murder mystery, Murakami's tale is a mystical, sexy, thoroughly contemporary exploration of an alienating and morally ambiguous society.

There are deaths and several disappearances in its unfolding, but just as important are the losses of motivation and reasons for living from its protagonist's life.

In the act of discovering the links between the lives that have vanished he finds a purpose once again for his own.

Translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum

Harvill Press

$27.95

* Shonagh Lindsay is an Auckland researcher and writer.