I feel like I have a weird relationship with Haruki Murakami. I really enjoy reading his books, but I seem to enjoy them more for their entertainment value than for their literary value; by which I mean, for as much as there is going on in his books, I don't feel the need to dig down beneath the surfaces, to do real deep critical thinking about them. Not that I'm necessarily doing much real deep critical thinking about the books that I do feel like reading or do try to read in that manner. I guess it's just that the sheer fun of the thing that Murakami does takes precedence for me, and so far, from what I've read of his, that's been plenty enough.

It's this reading-as-an-experience thing that gets me. I've read both The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore over the last several years and I know I really enjoyed reading both books--I remember enjoying them thoroughly--but I'd have a tough time explaining either of those books to you, of recalling what exactly happened in them. It's like I was so in-the-moment with them that I forgot to take the mental snapshots I'd need to refer back to later, after finishing the books. And this is fine, I think. A fine way to read books. If anything, it means I can read those books both again, and enjoy them almost as much as I did the first time, or at least in a way in some ways similar to the first experience I had with them.

And it's fitting, too, this forgetfulness, this sense of connecting everything as it connects, of getting from point A to points wherever; the enigmatic, elusive, ethereal qualities of Murakami's fiction are the source of so much of their pleasure, to me. Like slipping into a waking dream for a while, one in which things are just going to make their own sort of sense, whether or not they really do. And there will be pasta.

So when I say I finished Dance Dance Dance this weekend and that I found it fascinating and fun, I'm saying it the way someone who you might meet at your job might try to tell you about the dream they had the night before, the details already fading, but the mood still coloring their vision and cushioning their feeling of the entire day around you. Something happened, mysteriously, and it meant something, at the time. And there were girls, there.