Dance Dance Dance

by Haruki Murakami

  “You know that exposé about how the hotel got built,” I asked as we made our way carefully, “do you still remember the name of the magazine? Do you remember around when the article came out?”

  She knew right off. “And I’m sure it was last autumn. I didn’t see the article myself, so I can’t really say what it said.”

  We stood for five minutes in the swirling snow, waiting for a cab. She clung to my arm.

  “It’s been ages since I felt this relaxed,” she said. The same thought occurred to me too. Maybe we really did have something in common, the two of us.

  In the taxi we talked about nothing in particular. The snow and chill, her work hours, things in Tokyo. Which left me wondering what was going to happen next. One little push and I could probably sleep with her. I could feel it. Naturally I didn’t know whether she wanted to sleep with me. But I understood that she wouldn’t mind sleeping with me. I could tell from her eyes, how she breathed, the way she talked, even her hand movements. And of course, I knew I wouldn’t mind sleeping with her. There probably wouldn’t be any complications either. I’d have simply happened through and gone off. Just as she herself had said. Yet, somehow, the resolve failed me. The notion of fairness lingered somewhere in the back of my mind. She was ten years younger than me, more than a little insecure, and she’d had so much to drink she couldn’t walk straight. It’d be like calling the bets with marked cards. Not fair.

  Still, how much jurisdiction does fairness hold over sex? If fairness was what you wanted, your sex life would be as exciting as the algae growing in an aquarium.

  The voice of reason.

  The debate was still raging when the cab pulled up to her plain, reinforced-concrete apartment building and she briskly swept aside my entire dilemma. “I live with my younger sister,” she said.

  No further thought on the matter needed or wanted. I actually felt a bit relieved.

  But as she got out, she asked if I would see her to her door. Probably no reason for concern, she apologized, but every once in a while, late at night, there’d be a strange man in the hall. I asked the driver to wait for a few minutes, then accompanied her, arm in arm, up the frozen walk. We climbed the two flights of stairs and came to her door marked 306. She opened her purse to fish around for the key. Then she smiled awkwardly and said thanks, she’d had a nice time.

  As had I, I assured her.

  She unlocked the door and slipped the key back into her purse. The dry snap of her purse shutting resounded down the hall. Then she looked at me directly. In her eyes it was the old geometry problem. She hesitated, couldn’t decide how she wanted to say good-bye. I could see it.

  Hand on the wall, I waited for her to come to some kind of decision, which didn’t seem forthcoming.

  “Good night,” I said. “Regards to your sister.”

  For four or five seconds she clamped her lips tight. “The part about living with my sister,” she half whispered. “It’s not true. Really, I live alone.”

  “I know,” I said.

  A slow blush came over her. “How could you know?”

  “Can’t say why, I just did,” I said.

  “You’re impossible, you know that?”

  The driver was reading a sports newspaper when I got back to the cab. He seemed surprised when I climbed back into the taxi and asked him to take me to the Dolphin.

  “You really going back?” he said with a smirk. “From the look of things, I was sure you’d be paying me and sending me on. That’s the way it usually happens.”

  “I bet.”

  “When you do this job as long as I have, your intuition almost never misses.”

  “When you do the job that long, you’re bound to miss sometime. Law of averages.”

  “Guess so,” the cabbie answered, a bit nonplussed. “But still, kinda odd, aren’tcha pal?”

  “Maybe so,” I said, “maybe so.”

  Back in my room, I washed up before getting into bed. That was when I started to regret what I’d done—or didn’t do—but soon fell fast asleep. My bouts of regret don’t usually last very long.

  First thing in the morning, I called down to the front desk and extended my stay for another three days. It was the off-season, so they were happy to accommodate me.

  Next I bought a newspaper, headed out to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts and had two plain muffins with two large cups of coffee. You get tired of hotel breakfasts in a day. Dunkin’ Donuts is just the ticket. It’s cheap and you get refills on the coffee.

  Then I got in a taxi and told the driver to take me to the biggest library in Sapporo. I looked up back numbers of the magazine the Dolphin Hotel article was supposed to be in and found it in the October 20th issue. I xeroxed it and took it to a nearby coffee shop to read.

  The article was confusing to say the least. I had to read it several times before I understood what was going on. The reporter had tried his best to write a straightforward story, but his efforts had been no match for the complexity of the details. Talk about convolution. You had to sit down with it before the general outline emerged. The title, “Sapporo Land Dealings: Dark Hands behind Urban Redevelopment.” And printed alongside, an aerial photograph of the nearly completed new Dolphin Hotel.

  The long and the short of the story was this: Certain parties had bought up a large tract of land in one section of the city of Sapporo. For two years, the names of the new property holders were moved around, under the surface, in surreptitious ways. Land values grew hot for no apparent reason. With very little else to go on, the reporter started his investigation. What he turned up was this: The properties were purchased by various companies, most of which existed only on paper. The companies were fully registered, they paid taxes, but they had no offices and no employees. These paper companies were tied into still other paper companies. Whoever they were, their juggling of property ownership was truly masterful. One property bought at twenty million yen was resold at sixty million, and the next thing you knew it was sold again for two hundred million yen. If you persisted in tracing each paper company’s holdings back through this maze of interconnecting fortunes, you’d find that they all ended at the same place: B INDUSTRIES, a player of some renown in real estate. Now B INDUSTRIES was a real company, with big, fashionable headquarters in the Akasaka section of Tokyo. And B INDUSTRIES happened to be, at a less-than-public level, connected to A ENTERPRISES, a massive conglomerate that encompassed railway lines, a hotel chain, a film company, food services, department stores, magazines, …, everything from credit agencies to damage insurance. A ENTERPRISES had a direct pipeline to certain political circles, which prompted the reporter to pursue this line of investigation further. Which is how he found out something even more interesting. The area of Sapporo that B INDUSTRIES was so busily buying up was slated for major redevelopment. Already, plans had been set in motion to build subways and to move governmental offices to the area. The greater part of the moneys for the infrastructural projects was to come from the national level. It seems that the national, prefectural, and municipal governments had worked together on the planning and agreed on a comprehensive program for the zoning and scale and budget. But when you lifted up this “cover,” it was obvious that every square meter of the sites for redevelopment had been systematically bought up over the last few years. Someone was leaking information to A ENTERPRISES, and, moreover, the leak existed well before the redevelopment plans were finalized. Which also suggested that, politically speaking, the final plans had been a fait accompli probably from the very beginning.

  And this is where the Dolphin Hotel entered the picture. It was the spearhead of this collusive cornering of real estate. First of all, the Dolphin Hotel secured prime real estate. Hence, A ENTERPRISES could set up offices in this new chrome-and-marble wonder as its local base of operations. The place was both a beacon and a watchtower, a visible symbol of change as well as a nerve center which could redirect the flow of people in the district. Everything was proceeding according to the most intri
cate plans.

  That’s advanced capitalism for you: The player making the maximum capital investment gets the maximum critical information in order to reap the maximum desired profit with maximum capital efficiency—and nobody bats an eye. It’s just part of putting down capital these days. You demand the most return for your capital outlay. The person buying a used car will kick the tires and check under the hood, and the conglomerate putting down one hundred billion yen will check over the finer points of where that capital’s going, and occasionally do a little fiddling. Fairness has got nothing to do with it. With that kind of money on the line, who’s going to sit around considering abstract things like that?

  Sometimes they even force hands.

  For instance, suppose there’s someone who doesn’t want to sell. Say, a long-established shoe store. That’s when the tough guys come out of the woodwork. Huge companies have their connections, and you can bet they count everyone from politicians and novelists and rock stars to out-and-out yakuza in their fold. So they just call on the boys with their samurai swords. The police are never too eager to deal with matters like this, especially since arrangements have already been made up at the top. It’s not even corruption. That’s how the system works. That’s capital investment. Granted, this sort of thing isn’t new to the modern age. But everything before is nothing compared to the exacting detail and sheer power and invulnerability of today’s web of capitalism. And it’s megacomputers that have made it all possible, with their inhuman capacity to pull every last factor and condition on the face of the earth into their net calculations. Advanced capitalism has transcended itself. Not to overstate things, financial dealings have practically become a religious activity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porsches and Tokyo land values. Worshiping everything their shiny Porsches symbolize. It’s the only stuff of myth that’s left in the world.

  Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it’s the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there’s fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there’s formal and then there’s casual; there’s hip, there’s cool, there’s trendy, there’s snobbish. Mix ‘n’ match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It’s the way of the world—philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.

  Although I didn’t think so at the time, things were a lot simpler in 1969. All you had to do to express yourself was throw rocks at riot police. But with today’s sophistication, who’s in a position to throw rocks? Who’s going to brave what tear gas? C’mon, that’s the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there’s another web. Nobody’s going anywhere. You throw a rock and it’ll come right back at you.

  The reporter had devoted a lot of energy to following the paper trail. Still, despite his outcry—or rather, all the more because of his outcry—the article curiously lacked punch. A rallying cry it wasn’t. The guy just didn’t seem to realize: Nothing about this was suspect. It was a natural state of affairs. Ordinary, the order of the day, common knowledge. Which is why nobody cared. If huge capital interests obtained information illegally and bought up property, forced a few political decisions, then clinched the deal by having yakuza extort a little shoe store here, maybe beat up the owner of some small-time, end-of-the-line hotel there, so what? That’s life, man. The sand of the times keeps running out from under our feet. We’re no longer standing where we once stood.

  The reporter had done everything he could. The article was well researched, full of righteous indignation, and hopelessly untrendy.

  I folded it, slipped it into my pocket, and drank another cup of coffee.

  I thought about the owner of the old Dolphin. Mister Unlucky, shadowed by defeat since birth. No way he could have made the cut for this day and age.

  “Untrendy!” I said out loud.

  A waitress gave me a disturbed look.

  I took a taxi back to the hotel.

  From my room I rang up my ex-partner in Tokyo. Somebody I didn’t know answered the phone and asked my name, then somebody else came on the line and asked my name, then finally my ex-partner came to the phone. He seemed busy. It had been close to a year since we’d spoken. Not that I’d been consciously avoiding him; I simply didn’t have anything to talk to him about. I’d always liked him, and still did. But the fact was, my ex-partner was for me (and I for him) “foregone territory.” Again, not that we’d pushed each other into that position. We’d just gone our own separate ways, and those two paths didn’t seem to cross. No more, no less.

  So how’s it going? I asked him.

  Well enough, he said.

  I told him I was in Sapporo. He asked me if it was cold.

  Yeah, it’s cold, I answered.

  How’s work? was my next question.

  Busy, his one-word response.

  Not hitting the bottle too much, I hoped.

  Not lately, he wasn’t drinking much these days.

  And was it snowing up here? His turn to ask.

  Not at the moment, I kept the ball in the air.

  We were almost through with our polite toss-and-catch.

  “Listen,” I broke in, “I’ve got a favor to ask.” I’d done him one a long while back. Both he and I remembered it. Otherwise, I’m not the type to go asking favors of people.

  “Sure,” he said with no formalities.

  “You remember when we worked on that in-house newsletter for that hotel group?” I asked. “Maybe five years ago?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Tell me, is that connection still alive?”

  He gave it a moment’s thought. “Can’t say it’s kicking, but it’s alive as far as alive goes. Not impossible to warm it up if necessary.”

  “There was one guy who knew a lot about what was going on in the industry. I forget his name. Skinny guy, always wore this funny hat. You think you can get in contact with him?”

  “I think so. What do you want to know?”

  I gave him a brief rundown on the Dolphin scandal article. He took down the date the piece appeared. Then I told him about the old, tiny Dolphin that was here before the present monster Dolphin and said I’d like to know more about the following things: First, why had the new hotel kept the old Dolphin name? Second, what was the fate of the old owner? And last, were there any recent developments on the scandal front?

  He jotted it all down and read it back to me over the phone.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’ll do,” I said.

  “Probably in a hurry, too, huh?” he asked.

  “Sorry, but—”

  “I’ll see what I can do today. What’s your number up there?”

  I gave it to him.

  “Talk to you later,” he said and hung up.

  I had a simple lunch in a café in the hotel. Then I went down to the lobby and saw that the young woman with glasses was behind the counter. I took a seat in a corner of the lobby and watched her. She was busy at work and didn’t seem to notice me. Or maybe she did, but was playing cool. It didn’t really matter, I guess. I liked seeing her there. As I thought to myself, I could have slept with her if I wanted to.

  There are times when I need to chat myself up like that.

  After I’d watched her enough, I took the elevator back to my room and read a book. The sky outside was heavy with clouds, making me feel like I was living in a poorly lit stage set. I didn’t know when my ex-partner would call back, so I didn’t want to go out, which left me little else to do but read. I soon finished the Jack London and started in on the Spanish Civil War.

  It was a day like a slow-motion video of twilight. Uneventful, to put it mildly. The lead gray of the sky mixed ever so slowly with black, finally blending into night. Just another quality of melancholy. As if there were only two colors in
the world, gray and black, shifting back and forth at regular intervals.

  I dialed room service and had them send up a sandwich, which I ate a bite at a time between sips of a beer. When there’s nothing to do, you do nothing slowly and intently. At seven-thirty, my ex-partner rang.

  “I got ahold of the guy,” he said.

  “A lot of trouble?”

  “Mmm, some,” he said after a slight pause, making it obvious that it had been extremely difficult. “Let me run through everything with you. I suppose you could say the lid was shut pretty tight on this one. And not just shut, it was bolted down and locked away in a vault. No one had access to it. Case closed. No dirt to be dug up anymore. Seems there might have been some small irregularities in government or city hall. Nothing important, just fine tuning, as they say. Nobody knows any more than that. The Attorney’s Office snooped around, but couldn’t come up with anything incriminating. Lots of lines running through this one. Hot stuff. It was hard to get anything out of anyone.”

  “This concern of mine is personal. It won’t make trouble for anyone.”

  “That’s exactly what I told the guy.”

  Still holding the receiver, I reached over to the refrigerator to get another beer, and poured it into a glass.

  “At the risk of sounding like your mother, a word to the wise: If you’re going to pry, you’re going to get hurt,” my ex-partner said. “This one, it seems, is big, real big. I don’t know what you’ve got going there, but I wouldn’t get in too deep if I were you. Think of your age and standing, you ought to live out your life more peaceably. Not that I’m the best example, mind you.”

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  He coughed. I took another sip of beer.

  “About the old Dolphin owner, seems the guy didn’t give in until the very last, which brought him a lot of grief. Should’ve walked right out of there, but he just wouldn’t leave. Couldn’t read the big picture.”