Word: murakami
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...setting is the dystopic Japan we've become familiar with, both in recent films like Ichii the Killer and Battle Royale and in novels by Ryu Murakami and David Mitchell. In the Koganecho back-alley brothels and sleazy bars, Kazuki and his pals pass the time doing cocaine and working on their fake tans. When Kazuki becomes a passive participant in the gang-rape of a young girl, his father insists he resume classes at the prestigious Hosei Academy. (The rape is a side issue. Dad has made a large donation to the school and wants to get his money...
...Gold Rush reads a little like a Nipponized version of Bret Easton Ellis' cause macabre American Psycho, with a healthy cut of Murakami sprinkled in. There is the same shrugged response to ultraviolence and a sense that somehow society has let its children down. Grownups are just bigger, more disappointing versions of their kids, and parental supervision is nothing more than a distant rumor. However, where American Psycho, or for that matter Coin Locker Babies, retreated to the more comfortable perspective of satire, Gold Rush is bracingly and clinically realist...
...down, he considers using lies, truths, computers and guns; in the end his most effective weapon is a pizza. In Number9Dream (Random House; 400 pages), David Mitchell returns to a setting from his widely acclaimed 1999 debut, Ghostwritten: a dystopian and dysfunctional Japan, one-part William Gibson, two-parts Murakami-Ryu and Haruki. Like a cyberage Holden Caulfield, 19-year-old, fresh-from-the-countryside Miyake plods his way through Tokyo's cityscape, rubbing elbows with Uber-hackers, war veterans, playboys and yakuza-cum-spiritualists. Along the way he gets lost, kidnapped, chased, stoned, hired and falls in love...
...packs of liquefied sarin gas with their umbrella tips, leaving 12 people dead and thousands injured. Only two months before, more than 5,000 people were killed by an earthquake that shook the western port city of Kobe. "Some strange malaise, some bitter aftertaste lingers on," writes novelist Haruki Murakami in his account of the times, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. "We crane our necks and look around us, as if to ask: where did all that come from...
...influences writing this thesis have been Henry James, Aimee Bender, Haruki Murakami, Marguerite Duras, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Russian patricidal literature (my father thinks he’s going to be the “bad guy” in the story, but I don’t think there’ll be any daddy-killing...