Ryu Murakami my #GOAT kratko i jasno.

Scary. Funny, if you have a really dark kind of humor. Addictive. Better than any book I read so far. The ending is hilarious and the whole book is a lovely, creepy, gory mindfuck which makes you question Japanese morals and the whole postwar Japanese society. Highly recommended.

ein sehr absurdes und brutales Buch - hat mich irgendwie in seinen bann gezogen.

I really enjoyed this, even though it's a strange book and not quite what I was prepared for.

The basic conceit is that a gang of six aimless twentysomething men essentially go to war against a group of six thirty something women-- they literally murder each other, and the stakes escalate till the quite vicious, catastrophic ending. If you couldn't tell from that description, this isn't a serious undertaking, but some sort of satire-- the aimlessness and essential idiocy of the boys is a key component of this, and the female Oba-sans don't fare a lot better in terms of how they come across-- I don't really know anything about contemporary Japanese culture, so I'm sure that many elements of the satire went way over my head. It feels a little like Palahniuk at times, but maybe because it was just-foreign-enough, I didn't feel insulted or beaten over the head I do when I read Palahniuk. Instead, at least for me it's funny and inventive stuff, all balanced around carefully constructed chapters, each keyed into one of the songs of the novel's title, many climaxing in karaoke recreations of those songs.



It's funny and clever as well as being vicious. It's a really brisk read, which I needed after the Slavknikova. A lot to like here.

Unexpectedly fun, read almost in one sitting.

This is such a dark wee book. Really, you have to have a slightly twisted sense of humour to enjoy this. And the ending, so empty and hopeless, and yet very black comedy.

In a real moment of laziness I had not even bothered to read the blurb of this book. I'd read a couple of Ryu Murakami's books before and enjoyed them, so I thought I'd give this a go simply because it's written by him. Taking this into consideration, I started off thinking what a dull book. It's just about a group of 6 slightly geeky Japanese lads in their twenties hanging out, singing karaoke in abandoned places, get excited over pasta salad and perv at some unsuspecting woman in the neighbouring block of flats who foolishly gets undressed with her curtains open.

And then...

And then the dark plot gets started. And because I wasn't expecting it, having not read the blurb, it was a bit of a shock. Maybe we should all read more books this way? So, Popular Hits of the Showa Era. It could be referring to pop music hits, or.... turn away now if you want to start reading this in ignorance bliss.

These lads are a bit crazy. One of them goes strolling out in the street with his knife. He decides to creep up behind an Oba-san "auntie" and freak her out a bit. In this book the Oba-sans are women in their thirties, they're all divorced, a bit bitter and dried out. As a side character later on in the book mentions, anyone can become an Oba-san, regardless of age or gender. Anyway, when she turns around to scream at him, he slits her throat and gleefully runs off. Twisted, yes, but it's only starting.

These Oba-sans all had the second name of Midori, and hung out together. As they're gathering to moarn the death of their murdered friend, they automatically assume they're going to go out and hunt down the murderer. And when one of the lads is killed, the others can't figure out why anyone would attack them (!) and decide to get revenge... the styles of attack get more dramatic and complicated as this spiral of revenge descends to the extreme. And what's chilling is that when they're not out slaying each other, they're just hanging out together in their respective groups having their dull, inane conversations and not doing a lot. And they naturally switch back and forth between the mundane and murder.