Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami Read Free Book Online Page A

scarf, and coat. Underneath, she had on a dark green wool skirt and a lightweight yellow sweater—which revealed generous vol-umes I'm surprised I hadn't noticed before. Her earrings were demure gold pinpoints.
    She ordered a Bloody Mary. And when it came, she sipped it tentatively. I took another drink of my whiskey and then she took another sip of her Bloody Mary. I nibbled on nuts.
    At length, she let out a big sigh. It might have been bigger than she had intended, as she looked up at me nervously.
    "Work tough? "I asked.
    "Yeah," she said. "Pretty tough. I'm still not used to it. The hotel just opened so the management's always on edge about something."
    She folded her hands and placed them on the table. She wore one ring, on her pinkie. An unostentatious, rather ordi-nary silver ring.
    "About the old Dolphin Hotel . . . ," she began. "But wait, didn't I hear you were a magazine writer or some-thing?"
    "Magazine?" I said, startled. "What's this about?"
    "That's just what I heard," she said.
    I shut up. She bit her lip and stared at a point on the wall. "There was some trouble once," she began again, "so the management's very nervous about media. You know, with property being bought up and all. If too much talk about this gets in the media, the hotel could suffer. A bad image can ruin business."
    "Has something been written up?"
    "Once, in a weekly magazine a while ago. There were these suggestions about dirty dealings, something about call-ing in the yakuza or some right-wing thugs to put pressure on the folks who were holding out. Things like that."
    "And I take it the old Dolphin Hotel was mixed up in this trouble?"
    She shrugged and took another sip. "I wouldn't be sur-prised. Otherwise, I don't think the manager would have acted so nervous talking to you about the old hotel. I mean, it was almost like you sounded an alarm. I don't know any of the details, but I did hear once about the Dolphin name in connection with an older hotel. From someone."
    "Someone?"
    "One of the blackies."
    "Blackies?"
    "You know, the black-suit crowd."
    "Check," I said. "Other than that, you haven't heard any-thing about the old Dolphin Hotel?"
    She shook her head and fiddled with her ring. "I'm scared," she whispered. "I'm so scared I ... I don't know what to do."
    "Scared? Because of me and magazines?"
    She shook her head, then pressed her lip against the rim of her glass. "No, it's not that. Magazines don't have any-thing to do with it. If something gets printed, what do I care? The management might get all bent out of shape, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's the whole place. The whole hotel, well, I mean, there's always something a little weird about it. Something funny . . . something . . . warped."
    She stopped and was silent. I'd finished my whiskey, so I ordered another round for the both of us.
    "What do you mean by 'warped'?" I tried prompting her. "Do you mean anything specific?"
    "Of course I do," she said sharply. "Things have hap-pened, but it's hard to find the words to describe it. So I never told anyone. I mean, it was really real, what I felt, but if I try to explain it in words, then it sort of starts to slip away."
    "So it's like a dream that's very real?"
    "But this wasn't a dream. You know dreams sort of fade after a while? Not this thing. No way. It's always stayed the same. It's always real, right there, before my eyes."
    I didn't know what to say.
    "Okay, this is what happened," she said, taking a drink of her Bloody Mary and dabbing her lips with the napkin. "It was in January. The beginning of January, right after New Year's. I was working the late shift, which I don't gen-erally like, but on that day it was my turn. Anyway, I didn't get through until around midnight. When it's late like that, they send you home in a taxi because the trains aren't run-ning. So after I changed clothes, I realized that I'd left my book in the staff lounge. I guess I could have waited until the next day, but the girl I was