In the Miso Soup

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
(translated by Ralph McCarthy)

A happy little title, but don't be fooled, enter the dark and seedy world of the red light district Kabuki-cho in Tokyo. A morally ambiguous area with schoolgirls going on 'compensated dating', oniai matchmaking clubs layered over prostitution and exploitation.

Kenji has just turned 20 and takes foreign tourists on sex tours of the bars, strip joints and date clubs. His mother thinks he is enrolled in a college preparation course. He has no intention of going to college and is saving up to go to America.

Frank, a strange, overweight American tourist, hires him for a three night guided tour of the nightlife. There is something not quite right about Frank, and Kenji cannot get it out of his mind that he might have had something to do with the dismembered body of a schoolgirl, found recently in the area. Jun, Kenji's girlfriend is not happy that he has been hired for three days, because he has promised to spend New Year with her.

Strange incidents happen, and Kenji is more and more convinced that Frank is a killer on the loose, his eyes are "cold as dark marbles" and his stories are shifting truths.

When Kenji finds something like a scrap of paper stuck to his door his girlfriend looks at it as asks what it is. Nothing he says, throwing it away, but Kenji is horribly convinced it is a piece of human skin.

"Malevolence is born of negative feelings like loneliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if its been carved out with a knife, an emptiness you're left with when something very important has been taken away from you. I can't say I sensed a particularly cruel or sadistic tendency in Frank, or even that he fit my image of a murderer. But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that"

The book covers three days but is also constructed like a three act play, which may be the influence of Ryu Murakami's other profession of film director. The first part is an exploration of this particular Japanese subculture, the second is Quentin Tarantino violence territory, the third is an exposition and a complicity of corruption.

Ryu Murakami's characters are all either drifting, lonely or empty vessels. The Tokyo district of Kabuki-cho runs like a fault-line through the book and Murakami is a vivid writer. The translation is excellent. Sometimes books in translation can feel as though there is a veil between the writer and reader but not in this translation.

Would I want to read more of Ryu Murakami's view of Japan, I'm not sure. If I did it would be the quality of writing that would lure me more than his dark picture of the human condition. He has been compared in the blurbs to Bret Easton Ellis and that is someone I have never thought of reading.

Additional:
A Murakami interview from the Daily Yomiuri where he discusses his view of the Japanese character see here

Strangers by Taichi Yamada

Hideo Harada is recently divorced, never sees his son, and his TV script writing partner is avoiding him. He is retreating from the world and living in a building that although located in a busy part of Tokyo, is almost deserted, apart from the other inhabitant, a mysterious young woman.

Buying his own birthday present on his 48^th birthday (after his writing partner breaks the news that he wants to marry Harada’s ex wife) he convinces himself he has a new independence, and with little else to do decides to travel on the Ginza subway to visit Asukusa, the part of Tokyo where he grew up. His last childhood memory of the area was the blood stained pavement where his parents were killed in a hit and run accident.

Visiting the area temple and then wandering down various streets eventually leads to visiting the Variety Hall where he meets a man, who looks exactly like his father, and is invited back to this familiar faced strangers home where there is a woman waiting who resembles his dead mother.

We are not sure at the beginning of the novel if Harada’s parents’ appearance is just wish fulfilment, ghosts or he is having a mental breakdown. The couple look the same, are at the same age as at their deaths but live with modern possessions. Harada finds emotions to be troublesome so always tries to separate himself from them. Losing his parents at the age of 12 and then his grandfather not long after has given him certain emotional scars.

The first chapters of the book are very slow but as Harada returns to visit his parents the story gathers pace; his emotions vary between terror and yearning when taking the train to Asukusa to visit the couple. He forms an attachment with Kei, the young woman in his apartment building, but she has her own secret.

I would classify this book as a novella and rather like a MR James short ghost story when everyday events, only seem slightly strange at first, gain momentum and turn into something more chilling. Can the dead harm the living? Maybe like the eel meals that are consumed ,the truth is more slippery than that. Enjoyable as a quick read.

(Participating in Dolce Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge 3)