The Popular Hits of Ryu Murakami
Ryu Murakami is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature. Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first book, he has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society.
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The Popular Hits of Ryu Murakami
Murakami was born Ryūnosuke Murakami in Sasebo, Nagasaki in 1952. While a student in senior high, he joined in forming a rock band where he played the drums. In the summer of his third year in senior high, Murakami and his fellow students barricaded the rooftop of his high school and he was placed under house arrest for three months.
Murakami produced a few 8-millimeter independent films and started another rock band after graduating from high school in 1970. He moved to Tokyo, in October 1972, and was admitted to Musashino Art University’s sculpture department. In the 1970s, he met and married a band member, and in 1980, they had a son.
A fan and lifelong advocate of Cuban music, he introduced it to Japan and even established his own record label: Murakami’s in Sony Music.
Murakami is the chief editor of JMM (Japan Mail Media), an e-magazine he founded in 1999. Additionally, since 2006, he has presented Kanburia Kyuden, a chat show on business and finance that airs on TV Tokyo. He launched RVR (Ryu’s Video Report), a video streaming service, that same year.
Best Ryu Murakami Books to Read
Coin Locker Babies
Two babies are left in a Tokyo station coin locker and survive against the odds, but their lives are forever tainted by this inauspicious start.
As they grow up, they join the ranks of Toxitown: a district of addicts, freaks and prostitutes. One becomes a bisexual rock star and looks for his mother, while the other one, an athlete, seeks revenge. This savage and stunning story unfolds in a surrealistic whirl of violence.
Piercing
Kawashima Masayuki is a successful graphic designer living in Tokyo with his loving wife, Yoko, and their baby girl. Outwardly, their lives are a picture of happiness and contentment, but every night while his wife sleeps Kawashima creeds from him bed and watches over the baby’s crib with an ice pick in his hand and an almost visceral desire to use it.
In the Miso Soup
It’s just before New Year, and Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo’s nightlife. But, Frank’s behaviour is so odd that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: his client may in fact have murderous desires. Although Kenji is far from innocent himself, he unwillingly descends with Frank into an inferno of evil, from which only his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Jun, can possibly save him.
From the Fatherland With Love
From the Fatherland, with Love is set in an alternative, dystopian present in which the dollar has collapsed and Japan’s economy has fallen along with it. The North Korean government, sensing an opportunity, sends a fleet of rebels in the first land invasion that Japan has ever faced. Japan can’t cope with the surprise onslaught of Operation From the Fatherland, with Love .
But the terrorist Ishihara and his band of renegade youths – once dedicated to upsetting the Japanese government – turn their deadly attention to the North Korean threat. They will not allow Fukuoka to fall without a fight. Epic in scale, From the Fatherland, with Love is laced throughout with Murakami’s characteristically savage violence. It’s both a satisfying thriller and a completely mad, over-the-top novel like few others.
Popular Hits of the Showa Era
In his most irreverent novel yet, Ryu Murakami creates a rivalry of epic proportions between six aimless youths and six tough-as-nails women who battle for control of a Tokyo neighborhood. At the outset, the young men seem louche but harmless, their activities limited to drinking, snacking, peering at a naked neighbor through a window, and performing karaoke.
The six “aunties” are fiercely independent career women. When one of the boys executes a lethal ambush of one of the women, chaos ensues. The women band together to find the killer and exact revenge. In turn, the boys buckle down, study physics, and plot to take out their nemeses in a single blast. Who knew that a deadly “gang war” could be such fun? Murakami builds the conflict into a hilarious, spot-on satire of modern culture and the tensions between the sexes and generations.
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