Japanese director Takashi Miike’s riveting, horrifying 1999 film, Audition, became an international hit. The story starts out like a quiet romance drama, but it delivers one of the most unforgettable third acts the horror genre has ever seen. Miike gained a global reputation with that film, but the author of the book he based his film on—Audition—was unable to establish a similar reputation outside of Japan during his lifetime. On October 23, top-flight Japanese publishing house, Gentosha, announced the death of its most important writer—Ryu Murakami—at 74.
Some may have associated the news with Japan's most famous writer, Haruki Murakami (no relation), who has legions of fans in the U.S. and around the world. While Ryu Murakami never attained Haruki’s status outside of Japan, he was an equally important author in that nation. An equivalent would be Thomas Pynchon, a towering literary figure in the U.S., but has remained an enigma abroad.
The two Murakamis, who were friends, were very different writers. Haruki’s fiction is dreamlike. It draws readers into an unknown world, but one that’s emotionally recognizable. Ryu’s fiction is rooted in the disturbing realities of Japanese society that's outside the rest of the world’s postcard vision of that nation. His readers are confronted with violence, sexual extremism, and social disintegration. Haruki Murakami’s work is exotic and familiar, which helped him become a global literary phenomenon. Ryu Murakami’s preoccupations are rooted in Japan's far-from-universal culture, rendering his novels less accessible. In culinary terms, Haruki is Japan's sushi, which the foreign palate has proven to be sensationally adaptable. Ryu’s the island nation's “natto,” a fermented soybean concoction that's beloved in Japan, but its smell, texture, and taste have never traveled well. Very few Americans have even heard of it.
The postcard vision of Japan is one of convenience stores on bright, tidy streets. It’s bullet trains, kimonos, and cherry blossoms. The Japanese are polite, reserved and disciplined. Their society is rules-based and orderly. But there's an alternative version that takes place within the shadows of that reputable society. It comes to life after midnight when the streets thin out and the trains have stopped running. People wandering these streets at three a.m. have secrets. Some of them are tormented, others lost. It's these fringe characters that populate Ryu Murakami’s novels.
With his debut 1971 novel, Almost Transparent Blue, Ryu Murakami became a literary giant while still in art school. The book won Japan's most prestigious literary award—the Akutagawa Prize. The other Murakami, at 77, still hasn't received this honor. Set near an American Air Force base (the author grew up around one), the book depicts a demimonde of alienated and aimless youth, group violence, rock music, orgies and drugs. Rather than liberating its participants, the hedonism highlights their emotional emptiness and sense of anomie.
Murakami had a gift for making something look like normal right up to the point when it became far from normal. His characters feel disconnected to the society they're supposed to belong to in a nation that insists on adhering to societal norms. The violence that marks the author's work isn't there for shock value or stylized entertainment a la Quentin Tarantino. Most of it's there to express the anger that grows out of alienation and disillusionment. The author describes the violence in a flat, unemotional tone. In Coin Locker Babies, he depicts domestic trauma with a blasé listing of household objects used as weapons. In In The Miso Soup, Murakami provides a mechanical description of the effects of violence on the body aimed at making sure that his readers never think of the pain and destruction in abstract terms.
Murakami’s 1997 novel, Audition, echoes his central themes of trauma, loneliness and deception. A middle-aged Tokyo widower, Aoyama, holds fake auditions for a movie that’ll never be made to find a docile, submissive wife. It's the perfect setup for a Murakami story twist. Aoyama’s deception and manipulation appears to work at first. He begins a relationship with a beautiful, reserved, much younger woman (Asami) who, unknown to him, carries psychological scars from a traumatic upbringing. Aoyama thinks he's in control, but eventually Asami, who isn't who she appears to be, turns the tables on him in a gruesome, yet controlled and drawn-out fashion.
Murakami’s 1994 novel, Piercing, is the story of a happily married, successful Japanese man’s post-partum mental breakdown. Every night, Masayuki takes an ice pick to his newborn’s crib and sweats and shakes as he fights off the urge to kill her. To purge this unwanted urge that he can’t understand, he decides to murder a prostitute. Masayuki finds his target, Chiaki, but the plan goes haywire when he finds her bleeding in a hotel bathroom after a suicide attempt. He no longer wishes to kill her. After Chiaki gets out of the hospital, she invites Masayuki to her apartment where she drugs him and ponders killing him. Instead, she pierces her nipple, which relieves her of that urge.
Ryu Murakami wasn’t content to sit at his desk. He wrote the screenplays for and directed four film adaptations of his novels. The author established his own boutique record label under Sony Music to promote Afro-Cuban music. Murakami was also a record producer, a published writer of essays and op-eds, a TV host of a respected business and economics talk show, and a digital publishing entrepreneur.
Ryu Murakami’s novels are visceral, hyper-realistic reflections of a modern society that has everything but little hope for a better tomorrow. His characters inhabit a neon-drenched world full of media content and empty consumer culture set to a soundtrack performed by musical poets of the dark side such as Lou Reed. Murakami was the provocateur who did a service to his often buttoned-down nation by exploring its darkest sides. Every nation that's lost its health, as Murakami believed Japan had, needs a mirror to look into in order to regain it.