Product Description

A pulsating psycho-thriller from Ryu Murakami, author of In the Miso Soup

A renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami—a musician, filmmaker (Tokyo Decadence), TV personality, and award-winning author—has gained a cult following in the West. His first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, won Japan’s most coveted literary prize and sold over a million copies, and his most recent psychosexual thriller, In the Miso Soup, gave readers a further taste of his incredibly agile imagination. In Piercing, Murakami, in his own unique style, explores themes of child abuse and what happens to the voiceless among us, weaving a disturbing, spare tale of two people who find each other and then are forced into hurting each other deeply because of the haunting specter of their own abuse as children.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #161379 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780143038634
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
In this short, tense and brutally eloquent thriller from Japanese author Murakami (In the Miso Soup), Kawashima Masayuki, a young urban professional, faces the terrible fear he will stab his baby daughter, Rie, just as he once stabbed the stripper he lived with when he was 19. He decides killing a young prostitute will alleviate the building pressure inside him and protect both Rie and his sweet wife, Yoko. He plans everything meticulously, but what he doesn't bargain for is that his intended victim, Sanada Chiaki, an s&m worker, is as disturbed as he is. During their appointment, Chiaki experiences a "Nightmare" episode that results in a twisted game of cat-and-mouse. Murakami doesn't waste a word or a movement in this near-haiku of a tale that's breathless with anxiety and fraught with pain. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Kawashima survived a hideously abusive childhood and, as isn't unusual in such cases, bears the scars. Voices in his head, accompanied by garish images, urge him to re-create his stabbing, when a teenager, of the stripper who was his brutal mother. Because "only voices and images from the external world could neutralize those from inside," Kawashima's greatest fear is not of death but of blindness and deafness. When fantasies of stabbing his infant daughter as she sleeps in her crib start to dominate his consciousness, he lies to his unsuspecting wife, takes a hotel room, and meticulously plots to murder an S&M prostitute--who is petite, so he can more easily overcome her. Certainly not for the squeamish or faint-hearted, Piercing blends a cold-blooded true-crime ambience and unexpected, almost antic humor as best-laid plans go horribly awry when an equally scarred (she's a compulsive cutter) abuse survivor turned S&M prostitute enters the action. Oddly and thoroughly compelling as well as chilling, and neither black comedy nor horror, this is a strangely entertaining novel. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Ryu Murakami is the author of several novels, including Coin Locker Babies, which the Washington Post praised as "a knockout . . . a great big pulsating parable," and In the Miso Soup.

Ralph McCarthy is the translator of Murakami’s 69 and In the Miso Soup, and two collections of stories by Osamu Dazai.

Customer Reviews

The Other Murakami Strikes
Kawashima Masayuki seems like a decent enough fellow. He has a steady job, an advertisement illustrator, and he has a lovely wife named Yoko who has recently given birth to his daughter Rie. In fact, Masayuki is financially stable enough to set up a small baking school in his home for his wife who worked as a professional baker before giving birth. However, Masayuki suffers from one small problem. Every night for at least ten days or so Masayuki has hovered over his daughter's crib holding an ice pick near his newborn's body, even lightly scratching her cheek with its tip accidentally when his wife startled him one night. With his head filled with aromas that smell of burning yarn or burning finger nails, Masayuki somehow manages each night not to stab and kill his young daughter.

As the novel unfolds, we learn that Masayuki's mother was highly abusive when he was young especially after his father died. He had a younger brother also, but he was the only one abused because he resembled his father. During his numerous beatings, Masayuki learned how to separate his mind from his body in order not to feel the pain. Because he didn't cry out, his mother would become even more enraged and beat him more. Masayuki was eventually put in a home for abused children where he would remain for years. He would not meet his mother again until his high school graduation and at that moment in time he was able to do something that he had yearned to do for years: he hit his mother as hard as he possibly could. Troubles continued until he was nineteen-years-old. At that time he was in an abusive relationship with a thirty-eight year old prostitute and spent much of his time high on paint thinner. Their relationship ended one night when he stabbed her in the stomach with an ice pick. As one of the voices in his head tells him, he needs to stab another woman, this time killing her, to take away the desire to kill his daughter. Masayuki decides that is what he is going to do, and he begins a methodical plan to kill an S&M prostitute. However, he gets a little bit more than what he bargains for.

Often referred to as the "other" Murakami in some literary circles because he shares the same family name as Murakami Haruki, Murakami Ryu burst into the Japanese world of letters when he wrote his debut novel Almost Transparent Blue back in 1976 which eventually garnered him the coveted Akutagawa prize and since then he has written several novels, including the magnificent Coin Locker Babies and Audition the basis for the Miike Takashi film of the same name, short story collections, directed a number of films, and even hosted a television show. Murakami's novels tend to be quite graphic in sex and violence, but it is not completely gratuitous. His books attempt to unmask the true brutality that remains dormant in humans and shows what might happen once these limits are broken. He is also quite good at building suspense. Several times while I was reading the novel, especially close to the end, I had to put the novel down because the tension became too much to bear. An interesting book for those who are interested in reading some of the darker works that modern Japanese literature has to offer, Piercing makes for a quick, albeit nearly horrifying read.

Truly breathtaking
I'm not going to recapitulate what happens in the book. I've been a death investigator for 35 years now, especially the pathology of homicide, and have talked to a number of serial killers...this book still managed to terrify me. Murikami's ability to get into the amoral mind of a potential killer is amazing and the novel reaches such intense levels at times that I had to put it down and rest.
Murikami's prose is always delicious but this is a true tour de force.

Somewhat Dated Commentary on Japanese Society
Originally published in Japan in 1994, this latest translation of "the other" Murakami's works suffers somewhat from its relative age. This is the fifth of his ten or so novels to appear in English, and by now, his paired themes of alienation and ultraviolence are well past their sell-by date. The perspective he offers on Japanese society may have been shocking thirteen years ago, but with the proliferation of J-horror films, media coverage of Japanese suicide rates, and other such indicators of a society in social distress, his latest serving ends up tasting like stale leftovers.

The story opens with Masayuki, a successful young graphic designer whom we meet as he hovers over his new baby with an ice pick, stifling the urge to pierce the newbor'ns smooth, perfect skin. It seems that Masayuki was abused as a child and has carried all kinds of psychological trauma with him into adulthood, even as he has managed to arrange a very normal domestic life. However, the new baby has brought forth his hidden turmoil, and an inner voice convinces him that the only way to purge his awful yearnings is to actually stab someone, preferably a prostitute no one will miss. Masayuki's meticulous plan brings him into contact with Chiaki, a young S&M prostitute with her own hidden history of abuse (incest) and mental instability (she likes to cut herself).

When the two meet in his hotel room, nothing goes as planned, and after a gruesome battle, the two wounded souls actually manage at least a moment of connection. Murakami appears to be trying to use this vivid tableau to comment on Japanese society, notably how the modern emphasis on the individual can result to complete breaks with reality. However, its a rather flimsy and dated indictment, and the direct line he paints from childhood abuse to psycho adult behavior is far too pat. The interior thoughts of the two damaged souls are well rendered, but on the whole, there's not a whole lot here to engage with.