“I mean, just because I came up behind that Oba-san and poked her in the ass with my tent pole, she starts screaming like a banshee. I’m not about to put up with that kind of shit. Anybody would’ve lost it, right? I mean, what about my dignity? So I broke through the imagination barrier and took out my knife in the real world and slit her throat, guerrilla-style, and that was it. It was the right thing to do too.”


***


A little bit West Side Story, a little bit American Psycho, a whole lotta karaoke. That more or less sums up Ryu Murakami’s Popular Hits of the Showa Era. This deliciously perverse novel is a sexually charged, misogynistic, spiteful, blood-splattered tale of assault, murder and revenge between six young, very lost and destructive men, and a group of divorced, slightly older women who call themselves The Midori Society. When the first of the society is murdered in an act both twisted and celebrated by the author and the other men, it sparks a war between the two factions that escalates from knives and guns to heavy weaponry and genocide, all written with such over-the-top vitriol and satisfaction that it’s impossible to be taken as anything but a farce of deliberately low taste.

This is something of a theme with Murakami’s work. His books are reminiscent in tone of the more abrasive, socially detached works of Brett Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk, but so over the top by comparison that it’s practically impossible to feel any sort of attachment to the characters within. Which, given the segment quoted above, is a very good thing. You don’t want to feel anything for these characters. They’re avatars through which the author can examine extremes of social depravity and maliciousness, but without the heavy hand of societal condemnation hammering the message home. With that in mind, the book works best when it travels to descriptive extremes:

Nobue and Ishihara were in a state resembling sleep paralysis as their brains tried to process the afterimage of the junior college girl’s face. Unable to move, they were still shivering at the image when the actual face materialized before them, seeming to cause the blue sky to crack in two and the yellow ginkgo leaves to turn to scraps of rotting flesh, fluttering in the breeze. Both of them felt as if they’d just slurped up their own vomit.

It goes without saying, reader discretion is advised. In fact, I’d give such a warning for everything Murakami’s written—his style is unique, and certainly not without its merits, but the violent and psychologically distressing extremes to which he frequently takes his characters are not for the easily offended or nauseated. There is a great deal of humour in the book as well, though it is very dark and in some cases masks extremes more disturbing than what he conveys in the rest of the book.

A much better novel than "Audition", and left me wondering once again why more of Murakami's works have yet to be translated into English. It's quite a light read in terms of volume, but it has a lot to offer if you're just looking for a fun little book about a bunch of guys who get together for no real reason to get shit-faced and sing karaoke standards (until one of them murders a woman, and her friends decide to take revenge by stabbing him with a sashimi knife strapped to a mop handle). You know.

My goodness this escalates dramatically. Which of course is the best part of a Ryu Murakami book.

I initially had this dim notion the review would be some sort of thing about societal abandonment and meaning, blah blah, replete with [b:A Clockwork Orange|227463|A Clockwork Orange|Anthony Burgess|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348339306s/227463.jpg|23596] references, blah blah blah, but with as much forthright and hilarious nihilism as this novel has, I just can't.

It would be criminal.

Instead, I offer you the soundtracks to the first and final chapters: "Season of Love" and "Until We Meet Again".

Oh, Ryū Murakami, I think I love you.

A little slow to start, but once it revs up it goes all out until the end. Hilarious and twisted, a bizarre and f-ed up romp that escalated to a wild extreme… I think there’s a parallel to be drawn with some of Chuck Palahniuk’s work, but for my money I prefer Murakami.

Not for the faint of heart, Ryu Murakami delights in some over the top imagery that will either hit hard or miss completely with different readers, but it’s a hit for me.

Hilarious and disgusting at the same time! Great!