Dream Messenger
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Book Overview
Tokyo, New York, and uncharted territory of the imagination provide the setting for this remarkable, kaleidoscopic novel of life in the postmodern age. Start with an eccentric heiress in search of a son missing for twenty-five years. Add a detective team of beauty queen-turned-stock analyst and neurotic writer-turned-houseboy. Toss in a latter-day Fagin winsomely raising his orphans to be rented to needy adults; season with a gay man from New York with Oriental tastes. Combine with experience, speculation, and dreams. Then top off with Matthew, handsome, telepathic, free from convention, heredity, and home. Matthew is the dream messenger. He visits people's dreams, bringing comfort and wisdom to the troubled; in his own dreams he finds companionship and peace. In waking hours, he is a "professional friend", offering love to women and men who will pay. But Matthew is no ordinary hustler; he is a purveyor of truths unencumbered by parents, society, and nations. Contrary to popular assumptions, such truths transcend their purchase by money. Mixing fantasy with harsh fact, tantalizing with its intellect and sexuality, Dream Messenger introduces to the West a truly fresh, bold, international voice from Japan.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0446670103
ISBN13:9780446670104
Release Date:September 1994
Publisher:Grand Central Publishing
Length:293 Pages
Weight:0.65 lbs.
Dimensions:0.9" x 5.3" x 8.0"
Customer Reviews
2 ratings
absolutely sparkling
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 22 years ago
when one encounters this unusual novel by shimada, one's mind needs to be kept open. one of the readers' review said the story wasn't organized. i think it was very deliberately done.this novel is a literary jazz. it constantly wanders yet gets pulled together.the whole concept of the story is based on the wanderers and wandering. it is about defying everything that devides the world in dualism and all the institutional cliches we have in mind. this is about reinvention and re-integration of the existing world in order for us to evolve into the next step. matthew is a wandering soul. the rental child who, instead of being raised in a stable warm family, wanders about from one set of parents to another to fulfil their heart's content. dream messenger wanders all over with no discrimination of borders--between reality and dreams, self and alter-egos, continent to continent, person to person. this book is so completely on a different level. without an open mind it will be hard to accept it let alone understand. but i do agree the japanese version of the book was definitely much more inclusive of shimada's concepts. english translation does very much fall flat.
Haruki Murakami Lite
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 26 years ago
I definitely enjoyed this book for a lot of the same reasons that I enjoy Haruki Murakami's. It resembles Murakami's work in that it is set in an international, pop-culture kind of world, a world that makes as much sense to American readers as it does to Japanese readers. And it is a fast, fun, read, while at the same time at least touching on some more serious themes. However, my overall feeling about it is that it lacked the organization and cohesiveness of Murakami's works. It left a lot more just kind of hanging, and it left a lot of interesting ideas only half-developed. Overall though, definitely worth checking out.
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