Have just finished reading Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance (Vintage). I'm a bit of a sucker for Murakami's novels (haven't read any of his non-fiction yet) and have been ever since I first came across The Wind-up Bird Chronicle about ten years ago. However, Dance Dance Dance, which was first published in 1988, has catapulted itself close to the top of my Murakami favourites.
While his novels are wonderfully surreal at times, it's a quality of the narrative voice that sucks me in and draws me along - a quality that the translator (Alfred Birnbaum on this occasion) obviously manages to retain.
High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic thirteen-year-old drop-out with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk (in a hotel that houses a metaphysical hotel) and one very bemused narrator...
