Murakami, Ryu 1952- (Ryunosuke Murakami)

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Murakami, Ryu 1952- (Ryunosuke Murakami)

PERSONAL:

Born February 19, 1952, in Sasebo City, Nagasaki, Japan; married Tazuko Takahashi, September, 1976. Education: Attended Musashino Art College, 1972, and Tokyo Fine Arts College. Hobbies and other interests: Cuban music, film directing.

CAREER:

Writer and movie director. Has worked at various jobs, including as host of a late-night talk show and founder of a recording label. Director of films, including Almost Transparent Blue, 1980; Daijoobu, Mai Furendo (also known as All Right My Friend), 1983; Topaazu (also known as Tokyo Decadence and Topaz), 1992; and Kyoko, 1995.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Gunzoo Newcomer Prize, and Akutagawa Prize, Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature, both 1976, both for Kagirinaku Tomei ni chikai Blue.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Bundan, [Tokyo, Japan], 1975.

Kagirinaku Tomei ni chikai Blue, Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1976, translation by Nancy Andrew published as Almost Transparent Blue, Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1977.

Umino mukode senso ga harjimaru (title means "War Begins beyond the Sea"), Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1977.

Mahiru no eizo mayonaka no kotoba, 1979.

Koin rokka beibizu, [Tokyo, Japan], 1980, translation by Stephen Snyder published as Coin Locker Babies, Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1995.

Shikkusuti nain, [Tokyo, Japan], 1985, translation by Ralph F. McCarthy published as Sixty-nine, Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1993.

Ai to gensoo no fashizumu (title means "Fascism of Love and Fantasy"), Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1987.

Topaazu, Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1992, translation by Ralph McCarthy published as Tokyo Decadence, Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1993.

Rabu ando Poppu, (title means "Love and Pop"), [Tokyo], 1994, translation published as Five Minutes After, Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1996.

Michiko Kon: Still Lifes, Aperture (New York, NY), 1997.

In the Miso Soup, translated by Ralph McCarthy, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Piercing, translated by Ralph McCarthy, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2007.

Also author of Daijoobu, Mai Furendo, a novel; Odishon, 1999; Hashire! Ichiro, 2001, and Shôwa kayâ daizenshû, 2004. Author of screenplays adapted from his novels, including Daijoobu, mai furendo (also known as All Right, My Friend), 1983; and Topaazu (also known as Tokyo Decadence and Topaz), 1988. Also compiler, with Ruyuichi Sakamoto, of E.V. Cafe (nonfiction), 1989.

ADAPTATIONS:

Books have been adapted as films, including Almost Transparent Blue, 1980; Odishon, 1999; Hashire! Ichiro, 2001, Shôwa kayâ daizenshû, 2003, Sixty-nine, 2004, and Coin Locker Babies, 2008.

SIDELIGHTS:

Although Japanese writer Ryu Murakami has enjoyed considerable publicity in his native land, he remains a relative unknown in the Western world. Murakami was among the first Japanese to pick up the torch of the no-holds-barred lifestyle explored in the United States by Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, and, more recently, Bret Easton Ellis. For his wild descriptions of decadence, Murakami earned himself a reputation as the "Bad Boy" of modern Japanese literature.

Murakami's first book published in English, Almost Transparent Blue, was a surprise winner, in 1976, of Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Prize; the novel ended up selling more than a million copies in Japan in its first six months. As described by Grove Koger in Library Journal, the book serves as a "record of aimless fornicating, boozing, pill popping, and shooting up" within a population of young Japanese youth who live near a U.S. military base. U.S. readers approached this material with less shock than Japanese readers, having already experienced the "Beat" revolution. Even into the 1970s, however, the Japanese literary tradition continued to follow narrower subject matters, and that country's readers and critics were seemingly unprepared for Murakami's chosen topic of decadence, as well as the vividness with which he describes it.

Indeed, critics found with subsequent books that Murakami plunges into the genre with almost reckless abandon, attempting to make his sex scenes raunchier, his accounts of violence gorier, and his visions of the sleaziness of drug use more shocking than any writer—Japanese or otherwise—has done before. As Koger described in his review, the author's descriptions of such physical sensations as nausea and the effects of drug use, though translated from Japanese, remain "strikingly vivid."

Murakami's next two projects, neither of which have been translated into English, continue in the same decadent vein. Umino mukode senso ga harjimaru describes a drug user and his girlfriend who lay on a beach and watch the decline of a (probably) imaginary city that appears to them like a hallucination across the ocean. As Emiko Sakurai commented in a review of the French translation for World Literature Today, "Murakami conveys his main theme of a putrid world that is decomposing and must be cleansed by war and annihilation." However, the novel's author avoids a clear-cut moral. Sakurai wrote in his review: "This theme … comes across like any coke user's apathetic reaction to events in his fantasy, not a conviction born of sociopathical fervor."

Murakami's 1987 novel, Ai to gensoo no fashizumu, treads similar ground. The "hero," Toji Suzuhara, dreams of creating a fascist state in which he would wield power to redistribute resources. In one example he reasons that by killing off half of Japan's citizens through starvation, the island kingdom would be more manageable and better positioned to dominate the world. Sakurai, who also reviewed this novel, wrote of it, "Murakami again shows himself to be a decadent poet. The narrative of Toji's takeover of the world … [is like] a heroin addict's daydream, lacking in both substance and credibility."

The title of Murakami's novel, Sixty-nine, refers to the year 1969, when Japanese students protested strongly against various government policies. Murakami—who in that year was actually still a high school student—recounts the efforts of the high school students to mimic their college brethren who clashed violently with the police. He and a group of friends barricade the school building, spray-paint pro-Communist slogans, and try to follow the hippie ideal. Unlike the author's earlier novels, however, Sixty-nine "describes in a simple, straightforward style the events of 1969 and the protagonist-narrator's involvement in them. Moreover, the story … is full of humor and is intended to serve as sheer entertainment," according to Yoshiko Samuel in a review of the novel for World Literature Today. Indeed, as high-minded as the narrator claims his struggles to be, he eventually reveals that his real goal is to impress a girl he likes. Even with its antiauthoritarian bent, Sixty-nine is perhaps best summed up by a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who dubbed it "a great deal of fun."

Coin Locker Babies returns Murakami to the absolute fringes of rigid Japanese culture. His two protagonists are babies whose biological mothers deserted them, leaving them to die in train station coin-operated storage lockers. Although rescued from death and eventually adopted by a loving foster family, the two boys harbor enormous emotional resentment. As a Kirkus Reviews contributor noted, the coin locker babies are "an apt metaphor for kids unmoored from tradition." The two eventually part ways, with one of the two, Hashi, living in Toxitown, a haven for such outcasts of Japanese society as prostitutes, drug addicts, and thieves. Ultimately, Hashi leaves that life to become a rock star. Kiku, his foster brother, takes up pole vaulting and plots to destroy the world by locating a deadly chemical weapon, DATURA, that was scuttled by the U.S. armed forces after the Korean War.

As with past novels, critics found Murakami's intended message difficult to perceive beneath the ultraviolent, sex-filled prose of Coin Locker Babies. Terra Brockman, a contributor to the Nation, pondered: "It is not such a stretch to see Japan as a coin locker." Brockman continued: "It stands to reason that the more ordered, structured and repressed a society, the greater the chance that festering psychic unease will erupt suddenly and violently." Brockman added: "Coin Locker Babies, with its sledgehammer approach to social realism, is not an easy book to abide. But perhaps it takes a sledgehammer to smash a window into the walled-off world of Japan's dispossessed." Yoshiko Samuel of World Literature Today added to Brockman's assessment, noting: "The two boys consequently become each other's alter ego, with Kiku representing destruction and death and Hashi signifying life." Samuel wrote, "The explosive rhythms of hard rock, the intensity of emotions, and the highly vivid images make Ryu Murakami's postmodern novel an exceptionally successful one."

Murakami's 1994 novel Rabu ando Poppu, which means "Love and Pop," was published in English as Five Minutes After. The story revolves around the Japanese trend of telephone dating clubs in which young women get paid to date businessmen and subsequently work to get as much money out of the men as possible. The story follows sixteen-year-old Hiromi who decides to go into the dating business so she can buy an expensive bauble at a department store. She soon finds herself with three friends singing karaoke for a man who wants them to suck on grapes and spit them into a container so he can collect their DNA and create perfect young virgins in the future. "If this is pulp, it is original pulp," commented a contributor to the Economist. "If it is literature, it is abnormally entertaining."

In his novel In the Miso Soup, Murakami presents a horror novel featuring Kenji, a guide to the nightlife in the unsavory sections of the city of Shinjuku. When Kenji starts showing Frank around the town, he is made uncomfortable by Frank's strange-looking skin and his suspicion that Frank may be the murderer of young prostitutes, whose mutilated bodies are being discovered around town. As he narrates the story, Kenji wonders if he is in his right mind until he witnesses Frank murder a group of people in the local bar. Frank, however, does not kill Kenji but instead takes him to his home, believing that in Kenji he has found a friend.

"The story, however, is more than an entertaining escapist narrative in that it exposes the dark side of Japan's consumer economy," wrote World Literature Today contributor Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel of In the Miso Soup. "Moreover, it illuminates the psychopath protagonist's confrontation with the monster within himself and his eventual success in establishing ‘connection and communion’ with himself and society."

Reviewers generally praised In the Miso Soup. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called it "a blistering portrait of contemporary Japan, its nihilism and decadence wrapped up within one of the most savage thrillers since The Silence of the Lambs. Shocking but gripping." Daniel Fierman, writing in Entertainment Weekly, commented that the novel "oozes darkness and ambiguity and reads like a cross-Pacific bullet train."

Piercing focuses on Kawashima, who survived an abusive life as a child and eventually stabbed to death his stripper mother. Years later, he is married and has a young child when he begins hearing voices in his head telling him to recreate his act of violence. Kawashima first dreams of stabbing his young baby daughter but then decides to turn his murderous intentions on a prostitute. However, when he finally decides to carry out his plan on a sadomasochist prostitute, Kawashima discovers that he is not the only deranged and dangerous person. Whitney Scott, writing in Booklist, called Piercing "oddly and thoroughly compelling as well as chilling." A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that the author "doesn't waste a word or a movement in this near-haiku of a tale."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Murakami, Ryu, Kagirinaku Tomei ni chikai Blue, Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1976, translation by Nancy Andrew published as Almost Transparent Blue, Kodansha (Tokyo, Japan), 1977.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, February, 1994, "69: Sixty-nine," p. 126.

Booklist, March 15, 1990, "Murakami Ryu Ryori Shosetsu Shu," p. 1420; December 1, 2003, Frank Sennett, review of In the Miso Soup, p. 647; March 1, 2007, Whitney Scott, review of Piercing, p. 64.

Book World, November 27, 1977, review of Almost Transparent Blue, p. E7.

Economist, February 15, 1997, review of Rabu ando Poppu, p. 17.

Entertainment Weekly, January 23, 2004, Daniel Fierman, review of In the Miso Soup, p. 104.

Guardian (London, England), January 20, 2007, Chris Petit, review of Piercing.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1993, review of Sixty-nine, p. 1096; January 1, 1995, review of Coin Locker Babies, p. 17; November 15, 2003, review of In the Miso Soup, p. 1334; February 1, 2007, review of Piercing, p. 94.

Library Journal, November 15, 1977, Grove Koger, review of Almost Transparent Blue, p. 2368; September 15, 1993, Mark Woodhouse, review of Sixty-nine, p. 105; March 15, 1995, Mark Woodhouse, review of Coin Locker Babies, p. 99; March 1, 2007, Ronald Samul, review of Piercing, p. 76.

Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2007, Karrie Higgins, review of In the Miso Soup.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 20, 1994, review of Sixty-nine, p. 6.

Nation, May 29, 1995, Terra Brockman, review of Coin Locker Babies, pp. 766-767.

New Statesman, February 5, 2007, Alastair Sooke, review of Piercing, p. 59.

New York Times Book Review, January 11, 2004, Curtis Sittenfeld, review of In the Miso Soup.

Observer, June 7, 1992, review of Almost Transparent Blue, p. 66.

Publishers Weekly, August 23, 1993, review of Sixty-nine, p. 58; March 20, 1995, review of Coin Locker Babies, 43; February 19, 2007, review of Piercing, p. 148.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, summer, 1994, Brooke Horvath, review of Sixty-nine, p. 212; spring, 1996, Brooke Horvath, review of Coin Locker Babies, p. 173.

San Francisco Review of Books, July, 1995, review of Coin Locker Babies, p. 5.

World Literature Today, winter, 1983, "La guerre commence au-dela de la mer," p. 173; winter, 1989, Emiko Sakurai, "Ai to gensoo no fashizumu, 2 vols.," p. 165; summer, 1994, Yoshiko Samuel, review of Sixty-nine, p. 639; summer, 1996, Yoshiko Samuel, review of Coin Locker Babies, p. 763; September-December, 2004, Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel, review of In the Miso Soup, p. 88.