Dance Dance Dance

Those who know a bit about me will be surprised to discover that the title has absolutely nothing to do with my passion for partner dancing. The title is actually the title of a book by Haruki Murakami, who happens to be one of my favorite authors and I'm now a couple of books closer to my goal of reading all of his works. In the past week I was trying to decide which book to read next, and the title Dance Dance Dance naturally appealed to me. I decided to read a few reviews first to get an idea of what the work was about, and it came out that Dance Dance Dance was described as being a sequel to the book A Wild Sheep Chase. So I read that one first earlier in the week before just having finished Dance Dance Dance (hereafter referred to as DDD to save myself some typing) earlier today.

I've read a lot throughout my life. It started the summer when I was about 6 or so when my older sister got a summer job working at the library, and I spent every day in the library because I couldn't be left home alone. All I had to do was read, and I've been reading a lot ever since. The reality of it is that I starting doing it primarily just to occupy myself. I'd read the sides of the cereal box at breakfast or the side of a Lysol can while doing my business in the bathroom. I read a lot of science fiction into my 20's: Piers Anthony, Alan Dean Foster (I've kept up with his Flinx series), Asimov, Pournelle, Niven, Harrison a lot of Star Trek novels, among others. I tried Clarke, but just couldn't get into his stuff despite the popularity of 2001 as a movie. Heinlein also didn't do much for me. I tried Bradbury, but he mainly wrote about the human condition and happened to set the surroundings in space. Surprisingly, I found Douglas Adams boring. I wasn't so crazy about McCaffrey Dragon series, but I really got into Damia series. Not surprisingly I also got into the psi aspects of Marion Zimmer Bradley Darkover series. Looking back now, I could see that I was drawn more into possibility of different realities, and this interest is now evinced by my evolution into more of a surrealistic approach by authors like Murakami. It's ironic that Murakami is one of the most celebrated Japanese authors of his time yet his work is often criticized for being "too western" because I can now see that it's the clash between Japanese & western culture that drives a lot of Murakami's plots that has drawn me to his work.  

On the flip side of a coin in this literary currency is another author I greatly admire, Kazuo Ishiguro, who is obviously genetically Japanese, but identifies as British, having emigrated from Japan during his childhood/ Still, he clearly acknowledges that his experience growing up in a Japanese family in Britain has been crucial in his writing, allowing him to see things from a perspective different from that of many of his peers. Rather than attempt to reinvent the wheel, I will borrow the following phrase used when Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature: he 

"has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world" 

though I might then continue by suggesting that he's explored how we lie/deny things about how and what we feel and believe. 

And now we've reached the crux of the matter. I've maintained that Asian & Western cultures/world views have qualities/characteristics/values that are mutually exclusive, so that it's not possible to fuse the cultures. The reality is that at any given moment one value has to dominate any other mutually exclusive value. So fusion is not possible. But now I am coming to a point of believing that the attempt must be made - and the process of choosing which mutually exclusive value will dominate is necessary, because the process forces one to deal with any sort of lies/denial of truths that the other culture allows. And here I come full circle: the title DDD refers to how the protagonist has described his life of just repeating the same dance steps to the same beat over and over again. I could describe most of my existence the same way. But now I have to come to grips that I need to continue my process of self examination and face up to truths, emotional or otherwise, that I've been denying up to this point. It's scary as anything, but it's exciting to consider the idea that the process might lead to something as influential as Ishiguro & Murakami have accomplished in their explorations.