From the author of the infamously shocking Audition, and described as reading "like the script notes for American Psycho - The Holiday Abroad", Ryu Murakami's In The Miso Soup is not to be taken lightly. Like Murakami's most famous novel (and the equally gut-wrenching screen adaptation), its power to shock lies not so much in its admittedly stomach-churning scenes of horror, but the now-you-see-it turn of tone and pace that flips the story on its head in the space of a paragraph and changes everything.
ITMS unfolds over three nights in the run-up to New Year's Eve, taking place amongst the seedy nightspots, crowded streets and curious sub-cultures of Tokyo's sex industry. Into the midst of this comes Frank, an overweight, over-earnest American who has come to enjoy the best of Japan's dark side. His guide - and ours - is Kenji, a young man who makes his living showing gaijin (foreigners) around this perplexing maze. Murakami paints this off-the-tourist-map slice of Japan in dark, unsettling and shifting tones, and conveys adeptly the myriad of peculiar customs, conventions and attitudes that keep foreigners largely out of Kabuki-Cho, the city's red-light district.
Frank is no ordinary sex tourist, though - unfortunately for Kenji, who had more run-of-the-mill plans for the turn of the year. Increasingly, it becomes apparent that as dark as Kabuki-Cho gets, Frank only gets darker - and Kenji finds himself pulled ever, inextricably deeper into the nightmare his client creates.
The shock-n'-awe brutality of this novel isn't that unusual, especially in the kind of Japanese literature that has made the leap to film and subsequent, watered-down remake. What makes the violence and visceral chill of ITMS so much more affecting, however, is the part it plays in the story. Unlike in Audition, these scenes are not the fast-paced denouement to the story - heavy, relentless and summative, like a computer-game end boss. Instead they come slap-bang in the middle of the book, and after a scene of an intensity which makes the protagonist lose his lunch on the floor, everything settles back down, and Frank regains his sheeny veneer of affability. Nothing, of course, is quite the same, but this firing and calming of the story's pulse is one that sucks in the reader and makes the terrifying figure of Frank so much more unnerving.
"Unnerving" is only really the start of it. Confusing and complex, you sympathise with and detest Frank in turn - his actions swing from the bizarre to the horrific, and the author manipulates you right into Kenji's shoes, never knowing what face he'll show next. In a genre that's seen many iconic antagonists, Frank is right up there. I'd love to see him interpreted on screen, but I'm not sure any film would quite do justice to the disquieting jumble he represents.
Ryu Murakami's books are hard to recommend, as the customary twist and turn of pace and punch is so graphic and disturbing, it kind of threatens to overshadow everything else that happens. The rest of the story, though is so much more calm, measured and insightful - twisting the lid of this impenetrable aspect of Tokyo and sorting methodically through the tricky issue of Japanese relationships with the rest of the world.
The manga-styled graphics and promises of violent glee that adorn the cover shouldn't obscure the fact that this is an intelligent, perceptive novel, skilfully written and adeptly translated by Ralph McCarthy, who seems to handle the nuances of a Japanese author describing subtle facets of Japanese sub-culture notably well. It helps of course that the narrative entails Kenji explaining such things to a curious Frank, so much of the work is done - but the author's "voice" is nonetheless finely carried across. All this said, though, it's hard to get past the excesses and terrors of Frank's descent into nightmare - and this is meant literally; not everyone will carry on reading past this point.
If you can stomach the extremities of Murakami's imagination, though, this is a richly rewarding novel. It strains at boundaries and takes risks which pay off in an ending of tantalising ambiguity which nicely offsets the hardcore halfway-mark. In The Miso Soup isn't easy, but it is bleakly, blackly, brilliantly good.
ITMS unfolds over three nights in the run-up to New Year's Eve, taking place amongst the seedy nightspots, crowded streets and curious sub-cultures of Tokyo's sex industry. Into the midst of this comes Frank, an overweight, over-earnest American who has come to enjoy the best of Japan's dark side. His guide - and ours - is Kenji, a young man who makes his living showing gaijin (foreigners) around this perplexing maze. Murakami paints this off-the-tourist-map slice of Japan in dark, unsettling and shifting tones, and conveys adeptly the myriad of peculiar customs, conventions and attitudes that keep foreigners largely out of Kabuki-Cho, the city's red-light district.
Frank is no ordinary sex tourist, though - unfortunately for Kenji, who had more run-of-the-mill plans for the turn of the year. Increasingly, it becomes apparent that as dark as Kabuki-Cho gets, Frank only gets darker - and Kenji finds himself pulled ever, inextricably deeper into the nightmare his client creates.
The shock-n'-awe brutality of this novel isn't that unusual, especially in the kind of Japanese literature that has made the leap to film and subsequent, watered-down remake. What makes the violence and visceral chill of ITMS so much more affecting, however, is the part it plays in the story. Unlike in Audition, these scenes are not the fast-paced denouement to the story - heavy, relentless and summative, like a computer-game end boss. Instead they come slap-bang in the middle of the book, and after a scene of an intensity which makes the protagonist lose his lunch on the floor, everything settles back down, and Frank regains his sheeny veneer of affability. Nothing, of course, is quite the same, but this firing and calming of the story's pulse is one that sucks in the reader and makes the terrifying figure of Frank so much more unnerving.
"Unnerving" is only really the start of it. Confusing and complex, you sympathise with and detest Frank in turn - his actions swing from the bizarre to the horrific, and the author manipulates you right into Kenji's shoes, never knowing what face he'll show next. In a genre that's seen many iconic antagonists, Frank is right up there. I'd love to see him interpreted on screen, but I'm not sure any film would quite do justice to the disquieting jumble he represents.
Ryu Murakami's books are hard to recommend, as the customary twist and turn of pace and punch is so graphic and disturbing, it kind of threatens to overshadow everything else that happens. The rest of the story, though is so much more calm, measured and insightful - twisting the lid of this impenetrable aspect of Tokyo and sorting methodically through the tricky issue of Japanese relationships with the rest of the world.
The manga-styled graphics and promises of violent glee that adorn the cover shouldn't obscure the fact that this is an intelligent, perceptive novel, skilfully written and adeptly translated by Ralph McCarthy, who seems to handle the nuances of a Japanese author describing subtle facets of Japanese sub-culture notably well. It helps of course that the narrative entails Kenji explaining such things to a curious Frank, so much of the work is done - but the author's "voice" is nonetheless finely carried across. All this said, though, it's hard to get past the excesses and terrors of Frank's descent into nightmare - and this is meant literally; not everyone will carry on reading past this point.
If you can stomach the extremities of Murakami's imagination, though, this is a richly rewarding novel. It strains at boundaries and takes risks which pay off in an ending of tantalising ambiguity which nicely offsets the hardcore halfway-mark. In The Miso Soup isn't easy, but it is bleakly, blackly, brilliantly good.
A perfect nightmare.
