Dream Messenger [Hardcover]

Masahiko Shimada (Author), Philip Gabriel (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1992

A wealthy woman hires a beauty-queen-turned-securities-analyst to find her lost son - now a "professional friend" who visits people's dreams.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this trying-too-hard-to-be-hip contemporary novel of fantasy, kinky sex, and emotional insecurity, young Japanese writer Shimada explores the fate of "rental children," who grow up willing to do anything--for a price. (Renting substitute children is a concept popular in Japan, where harried parents have taken to sending substitute offspring to perform social services, . visit their grandparents, etc.) Protagonist Masao Fudo is taken in at age five by would-be social engineer Yusaku Katagiri, who "rents out" the adopted kids of his Manhattan Orphan Republic by the day, the week or longer to lonely grown-ups who can pay for their companionship. As an adult, Masao (who anglicizes his name to Matthew) hightails it to Tokyo along with his guardian spirit, Mikainaito; unfortunately, the supernatural buddy cannot rescue Masao/Matthew from the revolving-door tawdriness of life as a "professional" friend, gigolo and toady, mostly in artsy, publishing and rock music circles. Masao's natural mother, Mika (now a rich widow) hires beauty contest winner Maiko (now a financial analyst) to locate her son--in essence, to buy him back in his adulthood, since she missed out on his youth. The improbabilities multiply in this choppy narrative melange of unsympathetic characters (too many of whom have similar-sounding M names), bad poetry, wooden dialogue, and imitation profundity, exemplified in such empty images as "a worried-looking dog eating pizza" (which rates a chapter title). Matthew claims that at age 18 he "awakened to the true value of being a dream messenger--the use of dreams to communicate with others." The best advice for Shimada is to keep dreaming, because no such communication occurs with the reader in this, his first novel to be published in English in the West.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Even the briefest study of its major characters demonstrates that barter is the central image of Dream Messenger . Mika Amino, wealthy widow of a Japanese gangster, is accustomed to purchasing anything she wants. As the action opens, she wants to locate her son, Masao "Matthew" Fudo, who was abducted years before to be used as a "rental child." Believing that financial acumen and skillful detection draw upon the same character traits, Amino bribes top security analyst Maiko Rokujo to locate her son. The adult Matthew is a "professional friend" who peddles companionship as exploiters once sold his filial attentions. Shimada organizes this interesting study of trans-Pacific culture and commercialism around Maiko's search for Matthew and their subsequent relationship. Though his curiously flat characters barely touch readers' emotions, Shimada captures their imaginations with lavish imagery that incorporates elements of both realism and fantasy. Larger and Japanese collections might consider.
- Jane S. Bakerman, Indiana State Univ., Terre Haute
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc; 1st edition (December 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 4770015356
• ISBN-13: 978-4770015358
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,699,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great author, fair book, August 11, 2000

By 

Sean Hamlin - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dream Messenger (Hardcover)

I have read much of Shimada's work in Japanese, mostly short-stories, and I have to say that the English translation of Dream Messenger falls flat. Philip Gabriel's translation captures Shimada's unique cadence only very infrequently, losing much of what makes Shimada's work a joy to read. To Gabriel's credit, Shimada tends to twist and contort Japanese grammer frequently, and he often turns traditional idioms on their heads. His metaphors, too, are very original and very provocative in Japanese. Unfortunately, very little of this translates well into English, and I don't envy Gabriel his job of having to try.

Aside from the difficulties of the translation, Shimada is, I feel, a much better short-story writer. His quirky style tends to lose steam in longer works, leaving you, by the end of the narrative, grasping for something concrete to wrap your mind around.

I was disappointed by Dream Messenger, considering how much I enjoyed his other works (the reason why I couldn't stand giving him any less than 3 stars in this review). With the right work and the right translation, Shimada could easily be ranked alongside Murakami Haruki. Unfortunately, this is the only piece of Shimada's that has been translated into English thus far. Maybe Gabriel will do better with some of Shimada's short-stories.

Unless I beat him to it...;)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Haruki Murakami Lite, December 17, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Dream Messenger (Hardcover)

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars absolutely sparkling, May 15, 2002

By 

"dazyner" (los angeles CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dream Messenger (Paperback)

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.