It has probably been two years since I read “In the Miso Soup,” what I consider more than just Ryu Murakami's flagship novel, but one of the few pieces of literature that I still draw on regularly when I want to ush and gush about fiction. I can still conjure what it feels like to read that book: Dreamy, terrifying and lonely, with a touch of nausea. And whenever I get into a conversation about books with someone I know can handle the dankest of dank, and the sourest of sour, the bloodiest of bloody – something that should be packaged with it's own air sickness bag -- I recommend it. Since then, I've been working my way through his canon, but cannot find another instance of where Murakami gives the literary equivalent of a kidney chop like he did in “Miso Soup.” “Piercing,” which was the followup to the greatest book of all time has moments of sublimely ishy text, but just doesn't have plot flow that it requires. It's like using fresh ingredients on day-old bread. Or, in this case, using freshly sanitized puncturing tools on a seasoned cutter. Murakami gets to the grit on impact, with Kawashima Masayuki watching his newborn daughter asleep in her crib in the middle of the night. Within three pages, he is caressing her cheek with an ice pick. Imagining what it would feel like to puncture the baby's skin. Instead of following his brutal instincts, he makes himself a promise: He will instead stab a prostitute with the ice pick. Get it out of his system, and save his little family. Kawashima begins filling a notebook with elaborate plans involving gloves, a change of clothes, a falsified accent, and the size, shape and skin color of the victim. “The woman must be not only young, but petite. A large woman would be more difficult to control in the event of any unforeseen glitches,” he writes after a dry-run with an aged masseuse. Turns out this isn't the first time that Kawashima has experienced such a craving. While he has gone on to become a successful graphic designer, a father, the husband of a woman who teaches classes in bread and pastry making in their home, he has had a troubled past. Abused, neglected, eventually raised by a foster family. When he was in his late teens, he got embroiled in a relationship with an older woman. A stripper old enough to sometimes mistaken for his mother, and who openly mocked him by bringing home strange men. One night, in a snit, Kawashima stabbed that woman in the stomach with an ice pick. The police were never involved. The woman lived. They broke up, but she did tell him that it really hurt during a few conversations they had in the aftermath. When he makes the call to the escort service, Sanada Chiaki's perspective comes into play. The young OCD prostitute is a self-mutilator who has recently misplaced her sex drive. She's got her own tales to tell, and when it finally comes down to go-time, things fail to follow the plans Kawashima sketched out so carefully. Murakami – a Japanese novelist, musician, TV talk show host – still manages to write better-than average fiction even at his worst. He creates worlds that look normal on the outside, but when you lift the lid you find it oozing with lawlessness. Well dressed sociopaths camouflaged with manners and hygiene, and bystanders who don't just turn a blind eye – they don't pay close enough attention to notice that anything might be amiss in the first place. This one is filled with black humor and picturesque words, but the apex of the novel is long with frequent perspective shifts that make it a little clunky.
I actually like Ryu Murakami most of the time, but this book was just, like, a parody of himself. Starts out with a guy messing around with his baby's cheek with an ice pick while his wife is sleeping behind him, thinking how nice a guy he is for not killing the baby, then he decides he needs to stab the ice pick into some woman's stomach, then decides on top of that he needs to know first hand if a sliced Achilles tendon really makes a loud pop, then gets a love hotel and writes all this down in a notebook and calls a special massage girl, but she happens to also be fucked up and stabs herself in the leg repeatedly with a pair of small scissors, they go to the hospital to get stitched up, then to her apartment. She tries to put him to sleep with GHB or something like that, but before he sleeps he manages to tie her up with electrical cord, then he passes out, she gets out of the cord, cleans up, and the guy wakes up and leaves. There, I just told you the entire book.So cliché, that Japanese stereotype of senseless, creepy violence, like the Guinea Pig movies, etc. This was a big turd of a book.
What do You think about Piercing (2007)?
If I had read a description of this I likely would not have read it. I picked this up because it was short, and because I confused him for the other Murakami, the 1Q84 one. Yes, that sort of thing happens to me. This is the one who wrote the book that became the movie Audition. So in the end I feel like I got off easy, relatively. Two deranged, sexually completely f-ed people meet and try to kill each other. Frequent mentions of songs and brand names - a little Easton Ellis. The prose isn't stilted, that's just how Murakami writes. Clearly he's working through some things deep in the Japanese national psyche, but until it's all worked through I'll leave Murakami to enjoy his many literary awards without me raining on his parade.
—Austin Storm
One of the most delightfully fucked up books I have ever read is Piercing. Yet, despite its gruesome content (Psychopathic killer vs Schizophrenic Prostitute) there is a strange and beautiful philosophy delicately balanced between the two protagonists. I must say that the strangeness of the tale does have the unique flavoring of the Japanese, so those who are fond of Japanese writing will probably like this. However, for those of you who enjoy the neat, though often exciting bundles of Western writing, you will likely be completely weirded out and confused by this. It does not follow Western conventions or expectations which is partly why I enjoyed it so much, but it is definitely not for everyone.
—Absinthe
Seriously perturbed about a rash of late-night impulses to murder his newborn child with an ice pick, Tokyo businessman Kawashima Masayuki decides that the only sensible thing to do is to murder a random prostitute instead. But even with all his careful preparations, which Kawashima painstakingly scribbles into a notebook, the last thing that our everyman hero expects is that his intended victim is just as deranged and volatile a freak as himself.Sanada Chiaki is a S&M call girl in her early twenties who has been suffering a sexual dry spell after a strand of unsatisfying boyfriends. When not lobotomizing herself on pharmaceuticals, Chiaki passes the time transferring the all-consuming inner turmoil of her deeply troubled past into acts of self-mutilation and occasional bodily harm to others.Piercing is a pithy and nasty novel that's structure and pacing at first emulates the shock-thriller before derailing completely into a twisted romance (of sorts) between two psychotic, toxic personalities. After a deceivingly cursory set-up, the book shifts gears and the last hundred pages, which - in a single chapter - relates Kawashima and Chiaki's eventful night together, moves at some serious fucked-up velocity. And while bleak and certainly not for the weak of stomach, there is a mean-spirited streak of subtle gallows humor that penetrates the often erroneous interior dialogues of the novel's two leads, giving the novel dramatic heft as a disturbing satirical peep show into the psychogeography of the give and take and take and take that we call relationships.
—Anthony Vacca
