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In the Miso Soup
Ryu Murakami
Translated by Ralph F. McCarthy
Hardcover 184 pages
152 x 226mm 490g
ISBN : 978-4-7700-2957-7 / 4-7700-2957-8
Publish : Feb, 2004
Price : $22.95 |
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[ About the Book ]
Another roller-coaster ride from a master of the psycho-thriller!
"A writer with talent to burn...Fellini and Gunter Grass, David Bowie and Dostoevski, Garcia Marquez and Mike Leigh's Naked all come to mind."—Gary Indiana (author of Rent Boy)
It looked as though Maki had another mouth below her jaw. Oozing from this second, smiling mouth was a thick, dark liquid, like coal tar. Her throat had been slit literally from ear to ear and more than halfway through, so that it looked as if her head might fall right off. And yet, incredibly, Maki was still on her feet and still alive, her eyeballs swiveling wildly and her lips quivering as she wheezed foam-flecked blood from the wound in her throat. She seemed to be trying to say something...
It is just before New Year's.
Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's sleazy nightlife on three successive evenings. But Frank's behavior is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: that his new client is in fact the serial killer currently terrorizing the city. It isn't until the second night, however, in a scene that will shock you and make you laugh and make you hate yourself for laughing, that Kenji learns exactly how much he has to fear and how irrevocably his encounter with this great white whale of an American will change his life.
Kenji's intimate knowledge of Tokyo's sex industry, his thoughtful observations and wisecracks about the emptiness and hypocrisy of contemporary Japan, and his insights into the shockingly widespread phenomena of "compensated dating" and "selling it" among Japanese schoolgirls, give us plenty to think about on every page. Kenji is our likable, if far from innocent, guide to the inferno of violence and evil into which he unwillingly descends-and from which only Jun, his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, can possibly save him...
Reviews
"Murakami has won some nice press for his unflinching look at violence and the underbelly of modern Japan; there's no doubt that it's deserved. His latest oozes darkness and ambiguity and reads like a cross-Pacific bullet train."
—Entertainment Weekl, Editor's Choice review
"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."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"...It is a testament to the strengths of Ryu Murakami's novel that it is ultimately defined not by its explicit depictions of violence and sex but instead by its misfit characters. In this skillful translation by Ralph McCarthy, Kenji is an appealing narrator, observant without being judgmental and nervous without being melodramatic; even the intensely creepy Frank is not entirely unsympathetic...Murakami deftly drops into this slim book both fascinating sociological details about the sex industry and often moving philosophical arguments about the forces that shape individual and national identity."
—New York Times Book Review
"In the Miso Soup is a thoughtful novel about loneliness, lack of identity and cultural and moral corruption. Through simple yet chilling language, Murakami doesn't condemn his characters. Instead he takes aim at rampant consumerism and the dumbing-down of Japanese and American culture."
—USA Today
"Murakami doesn't provide any easy answers himself, but what he does do is capture the emptiness beneath the bright lights with wit and sometimes even with poignancy."
—Washington Post Book World
"True to Murakami's genre-meshing instincts, this often grotesque and compelling novel takes the form of the serial-killer thriller...In the end, it becomes an existential meditation on a number of interlocking themes: the relations between the sexes, contemporary society's constant hunger for graphic depictions of sex and violence, and the difficulties of communication on a multicultural planet."
—Times Literary Supplement(London)
"Murakami exposes the myth behind the exoticism of sex tourism...the 'Great Omiai Pub Massacre'reads like pure Miike [the film Audition] mania... perhaps will play well on the big screen one day."
—The Village Voice
"Murakami's presentation of some unsavory aspects of his country is refreshing in its straightforward and unapologetic details. He offers no analysis or critique of the seamy underworld that is both part of and separate from mainstream Japanese society. He is very successful in removing a sense of the exotic that often filters into foreign books newly introduced to the English-reading public."
—Fore Word magazine
"...Sharp, suspenseful, brimming with psychodrama and wry cultural observations."—Gotham magazine
"A wicked meditation on the worst traits of American and Japanese society, this is a creepy culture clash indeed."—Booklist
"Murakami's analysis of the dark corners of the American and Japanese psyches is engrossing."
—Detroit News & Free Press
"...an exhilarating pageturner...In the Miso Soup is quality pulp made out of Japan's crushed, dark heart: Our pride, it suggests, is matched only by our self-hatred. We're desperately lost...but so are you...Slyly, Murakami has shown us that the real core of Japan and America's mutual admiration is also the commodity everybody else in the world desires, in all its horror and majesty—it's that mother of violence, imagination."
—LA Weekly
"Ryu Murakami's In the Miso Soup, just released in English translation, presents a postmodern movement in a doomed tango between cultures that simultaneously attract and repel each other...Since his debut novel Almost Transparent Blue, brimming with sex and drugs near a US military base, won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976, Murakami has balanced on the cutting edge of Japanese popular culture. His resume includes rock drumming, political and economic commentary and a stint as a talk-show host, but it is his novels and cult films that shock audiences."
—Asia Times Online
"In literature, as well as film, Murakami's voice is an important one in vibrantly conflicted discourse of Japanese and international culture. He is a writer whose work is important not only for an understanding of contemporary Japan but also the world spawned by American capitalism."
—American Book Review
"Murakami understands the world around him as well as any living author, and possesses the enormous talent and courage to face its grotesqueries enough to learn what they can teach us about ourselves."
—The Journal News(New York)
[An Interview with Ryu Murakami] excerpt from Giant Robot magazine
GR: What inspired you to write In the Miso Soup?
RM: I wanted to show that the more we depend on the U.S. politically, economically, and culturally, the bigger risk we will assume.
GR: In the Miso Soup features Frank, an American on a sex trip in Japan. Hasn't this scene subsided? Is it timely for this book to be translated into English?
RM:The sex business in Japan is still in demand. You can say it is even more sophisticated. There is more diversification than before. It is not just sexual intercourse. From heavy consultation about your life (at the level of religion) to murder, you can get almost everything.
GR: Is there a reason why Frank is American in the book?
RM: There are many Americans who have the modern madness, but the madness is universal so Frank is a character who can be sympathized with. Today, foreigners are more interested in Japanese traditional culture than Japanese are, and they are the ones who try to preserve it. This can be seen in any country's traditional culture. For example, there are Chicago blues fanatics in Japan. There are also ardent devotees of flamenco dancing in Japan, while many Spaniards don't like flamenco.
GR: Is there a reason why you haven't settled into either filmmaking or novel writing?
RM: I don't engage in filmmaking these days, but I may make a film in Cuba someday.
GR: Why are you so interested in Cuba?
RM: I like its music and dance. I also like the Cubans' political attitude. They don't depend on the U.S.
Author
Renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami has played drums for a rock group, made movies (including Tokyo Decadence), and hosted a TV talk show. While he was still a student, his first novel was awarded his country's most coveted literary prize and sold over one million copies. This appeared in English as Almost Transparent Blue, and has since been followed by the comic novel 69 and Coin Locker Babies, which The Washington Post called "a knockout...a great big pulsating parable."
Now, In the Miso Soup will give readers a further taste of the incredibly agile imagination that has won him a huge following in Japan.
Ralph McCarthy is the translator of 69 by Ryu Murakami and two collections of stories by Osamu Dazai-Self Portraits and Blue Bamboo.
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