Dance Dance Dance

by Haruki Murakami

  After collecting our bags at Haneda, Yuki told me where she lived.

  Hakone.

  “That’s a pretty long haul,” I said. It was already past eight in the evening, and even if I got a taxi to take her, she’d be wiped out by the time she reached there. “Do you know anybody in Tokyo? A relative or a friend?”

  “No one like that, but we have a place in Akasaka. It’s small, but Mama uses it when she comes to town. I can stay there. Nobody’s there now.”

  “You don’t have any family? Besides your mother?”

  “No,” answered Yuki. “Just Mama and me.”

  “Hmm,” I said. Unusual family situation, but what business was it of mine? “Why don’t we go to my place first? Then we can eat dinner somewhere. Then afterward, I’ll drive you to your Akasaka apartment. That okay with you?”

  “Anything you say.”

  We caught a cab to my apartment in Shibuya, where I got out of my Hokkaido clothes. Leather jacket, sweater, and sneakers. Then we got in my Subaru and drove fifteen minutes to an Italian restaurant I sometimes go to. Call it an occupational skill; I do know how to locate good eating establishments.

  “It’s like those pigs in France,” I told her, “trained to grunt when they find a truffle.”

  “Don’t you like your work?”

  “Nah. What’s to enjoy? It’s all pretty meaningless. I find a good restaurant. I write it up for a magazine. Go here, try this. Why bother? Why shouldn’t people just go where they feel like and order what they want? Why do they need someone to tell them? What’s a menu for? And then, after I write the place up, the place gets famous and the cooking and service go to hell. It always happens. Supply and demand gets all screwed up. And it was me who screwed it up. I do it one by one, nice and neat. I find what’s pure and clean and see that it gets all mucked up. But that’s what people call information. And when you dredge up every bit of dirt from every corner of the living environment, that’s what you call enhanced information. It kind of gets to you, but that’s what I do.”

  She eyed me from across the table, as if she were looking at some rare species in the zoo.

  “But still you do it,” she said.

  “It’s my job,” I replied, then suddenly I remembered that I was with a thirteen-year-old. Great. What did I think I was doing, shooting my mouth off like that to a girl not half my age? “Let’s go,” I said. “It’s getting late. I’ll take you to your apartment.”

  We got in the Subaru. Yuki picked up one of my cassettes and put it on to play. Driving music. The streets were empty, so we made it to Akasaka in no time.

  “Okay, point the way,” I said.

  “I’m not telling,” Yuki answered.

  “What?” I said.

  “I said I’m not telling you. I don’t want to go home yet.”

  “Hey, it’s past ten,” I tried reasoning with her. “It’s been a long, hard day. And I’m dog-tired.”

  This made little impression on her. She was unbudgeable. She just sat there and stared at me, while I tried to keep my eyes on the road. There was no emotion whatsoever in her stare, but it still made me jumpy. After a while, she turned to look out the window.

  “I’m not sleepy,” she began. “Anyway, once you drop me off, I’ll be all alone, so I want to keep driving and listening to music.”

  I thought it over. “All right. We drive for one hour. Then you’re going home to bed. Fair?”

  “Fair,” said Yuki.

  So we drove around Tokyo, music playing on the stereo. It’s because we let ourselves do these things that the air gets polluted, the ozone layer breaks up, the noise level increases, people become irritable, and our natural resources are steadily depleted. Yuki lay her head back in her seat and gazed silently at the city night.

  “Your mother’s in Kathmandu now?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she answered listlessly.

  “So you’ll be on your own until she returns?”

  “We have a maid in Hakone.”

  “Hmm, this sort of scene happens all the time?”

  “You mean Mama up and leaving me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All the time. Work is the only thing Mama thinks of. She doesn’t mean to be mean or anything, that’s just how she is. She only thinks about herself. Sometimes she forgets I’m around. Like an umbrella, you know, I just slip her mind. And then she’s outa there. If she gets it into her head to go to Kathmandu, that’s it, she’s off. She apologizes later. But then the same thing happens the next time. She dragged me up to Hokkaido on a whim—and that was kind of fun—but she left me alone in the room all the time. She hardly ever came back to the hotel and I usually ate by myself.… But I’m used to it now, and I guess I don’t expect anything more. She says she’ll be back in a week, but maybe from Kathmandu she’ll fly off to somewhere else.”

  “What’s your mother’s name?” I asked.

  I’d never heard of her.

  “Her professional name,” she tried again, “is Amé. Rain. That’s why I’m Yuki. Snow. Dumb, huh? But that’s her idea of a sense of humor.”

  Of course I’d heard of Amé. Who hadn’t? Probably the most famous woman photographer in the country. She was famous, but she herself never appeared in media. She kept a low profile. She only accepted work that she liked. Well-known for her eccentricity. Her photos were known for the way they startled you and stuck in your mind.

  “So that means your father’s the novelist, Hiraku Makimura?” I said.

  Yuki shrugged. “He’s not such a bad person. No talent though.”

  Years back I’d read a couple of his early novels and a collection of short stories. Pretty good stuff. Fresh prose, fresh viewpoint. Which is what made them best-sellers. He was the darling of the literary community. He appeared on TV, was in all the magazines, expressed an opinion on the full spectrum of social phenomena. And he married an up-and-coming photographer who went by the name of Amé. That was his peak. After that, it was downhill all the way. He never wrote anything decent. His next two or three books were a joke. The critics panned them, they didn’t sell.

  So Makimura underwent a transformation. From naïf novelist he was suddenly avant-garde. Not that there was any change in the lack of substance. Makimura modeled his style on the French nouvelle vague, rhetoric for rhetoric’s sake. A real horror. He managed to win over a few brain-dead critics with a weakness for such pretensions. But after two years of the same old stuff, even they got tired of him. His talent was gone, but he persisted, like a once-virile hound sniffing the tail of every bitch in the neighborhood. By that time, he and Amé had divorced. Or more to the point, Amé had written him off. At least that was how it played in the media.

  Yet that wasn’t the end of Hiraku Makimura. Early in the seventies, he broke into the new field of travel writing as a self-styled adventurer. Good-bye avant-garde, time for action and adventure. He visited exotic and forbidden destinations in far corners of the globe. He ate raw seal meat with the Eskimos, lived with the pygmies, infiltrated guerrilla camps high in the Andes. He cast aspersions on armchair literarians and library shut-ins. Which wasn’t so bad at first, but after ten years, the pose wore thin. After all, we’re no longer living in the age of Livingstone and Amundsen. The adventures didn’t have the stuff they used to, but Makimura’s prose was pompous as ever.

  And the thing of it was, they’d ceased to be real adventures. By now he was dragging around whole entourages, coordinators and editors and cameramen. Sometimes TV would get into the act and there’d be a dozen crew members and sponsors tagging along. Things got to be staged, more and more. Before long, everyone had his number.

  Not such a bad person perhaps. But like his daughter said, no talent.

  Nothing more was said about Yuki’s father. She obviously didn’t want to talk about the guy. I was sorry I brought him up.

  We kept quiet and listened to the music. Me at the wheel, eyes on the lights of the blue BMW in front of us. Yuki tapped her boot along with
Solomon Burke and watched the passing scenery.

  “I like this car,” Yuki spoke up after a while. “What is it?”

  “A Subaru,” I said. “I got it used from a friend. Not many people look twice at it.”

  “I don’t know much about cars, but I like the way it feels.”

  “It’s probably because I shower it with warmth and affection.”

  “So that makes it nice and friendly?”

  “Harmonics,” I explained.

  “What?”

  “The car and I are pals. We help each other out. I enter its space, and I give off good vibes. Which creates a nice atomsphere. The car picks up on that. Which makes me feel good, and it makes the car feel good too.”

  “A machine can feel good?”

  “You didn’t know that? Don’t ask me how, though. Machines can get happy, but they can get angry too. I have no logical explanation for it. I just know from experience.”

  “You mean, machines are like humans?”

  I shook my head. “No, not like humans. With machines, the feeling is, well, more finite. It doesn’t go any further. With humans, it’s different. The feeling is always changing. Like if you love somebody, the love is always shifting or wavering. It’s always questioning or inflating or disappearing or denying or hurting. And the thing is, you can’t do anything about it, you can’t control it. With my Subaru, it’s not so complicated.”

  Yuki gave that some thought. “But that didn’t get through to your wife? Didn’t she know how you felt?” she asked.

  “I guess not,” I said. “Or maybe she had a different perspective on the matter. So in the end, she split. Probably going to live with another man was easier than adjusting her perspective.”

  “So you didn’t get along like with your Subaru?”

  “You said it.” Of all the things to be talking about to a thirteen-year-old.

  “And what about me?” Yuki suddenly asked.

  “What about you? I hardly know you.”

  I could feel her staring at me again. Much more of this and pretty soon she’d bore a hole in my left cheek. I gave in. “Okay, of all the women I’ve gone out with, you’re probably the cutest,” I said, eyes glued on the road. “No, not probably. Without question, absolutely, the cutest. If I were fifteen, I’d fall in love with you just like that. But I’m thirty-four, and I don’t fall in love so easily. I don’t want to get hurt anymore. So it’s safer with the Subaru. All right?”

  Yuki gave me a blank look. “Pretty weird,” was all she could say.

  Which made me feel like the dregs of humanity. The girl probably didn’t mean anything by it, but she packed a punch.

  At eleven-fifteen we were back in Akasaka.

  Yuki kept her part of the bargain and told me how to get to the apartment. It was a smallish redbrick condo on a quiet back street near Nogi Shrine. I pulled up to the building and killed the engine.

  “About the money and all,” she said before opening the door, “the plane and the dinner and everything—”

  “The plane fare can wait until your mother gets back. The rest is on me. Don’t worry about it. I don’t go dutch on dates.”

  Yuki shrugged and said nothing, then got out and dropped her wad of gum into a convenient potted plant.

  Thank you very much. You’re quite welcome. I bandied with myself. Then I took a business card out of my wallet. “Give this to your mother when she returns. And in the meanwhile, if you need anything, you can call me at this number. Let me know if I can help out.”

  She snapped up the card, glared at it a second, then buried it in her coat pocket.

  I pulled her overweight suitcases out of the car, and we took the elevator to the fourth floor. Yuki unlocked the door, and I brought the suitcases in. It was a dinette-kitchen-bedroom-bath studio. Practically brand-new, spick-and-span as a showroom, complete with neatly arrayed furniture and appliances, all tasteful and expensive and without sign of use. The apartment had the unlived-in charm of a glossy magazine spread. Very chic, very unreal.

  “Mama hardly ever uses this place,” Yuki declared, as she watched me scan the place. “She has a studio nearby, and she usually stays there when she’s in Tokyo. She sleeps there, and she eats there. She only comes here between jobs.”

  “I see,” I said. Busy woman.

  Yuki hung up her fur coat and turned on the heater. Then she brought out a pack of Virginia Slims and lit up with a cool flick of the wrist. I couldn’t say I thought much of a thirteen-year-old smoking. Yet there was something positively attractive about that pencil-thin filter poised on her sharp knife-cut lips, her long lashes luxuriating on the updraft. Picture perfect. I held my peace. If I were fifteen years old, I really would have fallen for her. As fatefully as the snow on the roof comes tumbling down in spring. I would have lost my head and been terribly unhappy. It took me back years. Made me feel helpless, a teenage boy pining away again for a girl who could almost have been Yuki.

  “Want some coffee?”

  I shook my head. “Thanks, but it’s late. I’m heading home.”

  Yuki deposited her cigarette in an ashtray and showed me to the door.

  “Mind the cigarette and heater before you turn in.”

  “Yes, Dad,” she replied.

  Back in my own apartment at last, I collapsed on the sofa with a beer. I glanced through my mail. Nothing but business and bills. File under: later. I was dead, didn’t want to do anything. Still, I was on edge, too pumped up with adrenaline to sleep. What a day!

  How long had I stayed in Sapporo? The images jumbled together in my head, crowding into my sleep time. The sky had been a seamless gray. Implicating events and dates. Date with receptionist with glasses. Call to ex-partner for background on Dolphin Hotel. Talk with Sheep Man. Movie showing Gotanda and Kiki. Beach Boys, thirteen-year-old girl, and me. Tokyo. So how many days altogether?

  You tell me.

  Tomorrow, I told myself. It can wait.

  I went into the kitchen and poured myself a whiskey. Straight, neat, and otherwise unadulterated. Plus some crackers. A bit damp, like my head, but they’d have to do. I put on an old favorite of the Modernaires singing Tommy Dorsey numbers. Nice and low. A bit out-of-date, like my head. A bit scratchy, but not enough to bother anyone. A perfection of sorts. That didn’t go anywhere. Like my head.

  What was that all about? Kiki repeated in my brain.

  The camera pans around. Gotanda’s able fingers sail gently down her back. Seeking for that long-lost sea passage.

  What was going on here? I was thoroughly confused. Gone was my self-confidence. Love and used Subarus were two different things. Weren’t they? I was jealous of Gotanda’s fingers. Had Yuki put out her cigarette? Had she turned off the heater? Yes, Dad. You said it. No confidence at all. Was I doomed to rot, muttering away to myself like this in this elephants’ graveyard of advanced capitalist society?

  Leave it to tomorrow. Everything.

  I brushed my teeth, changed into my pajamas, then polished off the last of the whiskey in my glass. The moment I got into bed, the phone rang. At first I just stared at the thing ringing there in the middle of the room, and finally I picked it up.

  “I turned off the heater,” Yuki began. “Put out my cigarette. Everything’s okay. Sleep easier now?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I replied.

  “Nighty-night then,” she said.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Hey,” Yuki started, then paused, “you saw that guy in the sheepskin up at the Sapporo hotel, didn’t you?”

  I sat down on the bed, holding the telephone to my chest as if keeping a cracked ostrich egg warm.

  “You can’t fool me. I know you saw him. I knew that right away.”

  “You saw the Sheep Man?” I blurted out.

  “Mmm,” Yuki skirted the question, then clicked her tongue. “But we can talk about that later. Next time, huh? We’ll have a long talk. I’m beat right now.”

  And she hung up, just like that. Clic
k.

  I had a pain in my temples. I went to the kitchen and poured myself another whiskey. I was trembling all over. A roller coaster was rumbling under me. It’s all connected, the Sheep Man had said.

  Connected.

  All sorts of strange connections were starting to come together.

  I leaned up against the sink in the kitchen and downed the whiskey. What should I do? How could Yuki have known about the Sheep Man? Should I ring her back? But I really was exhausted. It’d been one long day. Maybe I should wait for her to call. Did I know her phone number?

  I climbed into bed and stared at the phone. I had a feeling that Yuki might call. If not Yuki, somebody else. At times like this, the telephone becomes a time bomb. Nobody knows when it’s going to go off. But it’s ticking away with possibility. And if you consider the telephone as an object, it has this truly weird form. Ordinarily, you never notice it, but if you stare at it long enough, the sheer oddity of its form hits home. The phone either looks like it’s dying to say something, or else it’s resenting that it’s trapped inside its form. Pure idea vested within a clunky body. That’s the telephone.

  Now the phone company. All those lines coming together. Lines stretching all the way from this very room. Connecting me, in principle, to anyone and everyone. I could even call Anchorage if I wanted. Or the Dolphin Hotel, for that matter, or my ex-wife. Countless possibilities. And all tied together through the phone company switchboard. Computer-processed these days of course. Converted into strings of digits, then transmitted via telephone wires to underground cable or undersea tunnel or communications satellite, ultimately finding its way to us. A gigantic computer-controlled network.

  But no matter how advanced the system, no matter how precise, unless we have the will to communicate, there’s no connection. And even supposing the will is there, there are times like now when we don’t know the other party’s number. Or even if we know the number, we misdial. We are an imperfect and unrepentant species. But suppose we clear those hurdles, suppose I manage to get through to Yuki, she could always say, “I don’t want to talk now. Bye.” Click! End of conversation, before it ever began. Talk about one-way communication.