Read: In The Miso Soup, by Ryu Murakami
It’s been a while since I read something that actively disturbed me, but this novel achieved that in spades. (Also, for those of you reading this, there won’t be anything graphic in this review, but the book itself deserves a massive content warning for violence, gore, and sexual assault.) The cover quote describes it as American Psycho on vacation, and that’s pretty close, though I think the central message of this book is more complex and insightful than Bret Easton Ellis’s fuck-you to yuppies. Rather than focus on satire, this book instead explores the idea of human malevolence.
The novel follows Kenji, a Japan-based tour guide who caters to American tourists looking for sex. Early on, he meets a man called Frank, who immediately strikes him as suspicious, and for a long while the novel plays with Kenji’s suspicion. Frank is a creepy character, to be sure, but he’s also an American paying someone to find him a prostitute; creepy comes with the character regardless. Up to a point, this could just be a very clever character study, and nothing more.
The dramatic peak of this novel is genius in its (pardoning the pun) execution. The author, Ryu Murakami, spends a few dozen pages setting the scene in a club by zipping from one character to the next, scathingly picking each of them apart, throwing their flaws front and center. Then, just as you’re almost hoping that some force of nature will come in and cleanly dispatch each and every one of them, Frank steps in, and - to spare you the details - the things he does are horrifying. That you’ve been hoping for something only makes it worse - it implicates both Kenji and the reader in his depraved activity.
Finally, in the third act, is when things get strange. Initially paralyzed by fear, Kenji starts to explore Frank’s fractured psyche, and develops something approaching a friendship with the man - one that uses terror as glue, but with something far stranger and uncomfortable binding them together. Here, the core of the book comes out. Murakami gets to grips with the impulse to destroy - not the hot-headed kind, but the kind that develops from imagination that we usually keep in check. By the end, you’re not disturbed because you’ve witnessed terrible violence; it ultimately comes from experiencing a hint of understanding as to its origins. It’s excellent, but it’s incredibly fucked up.