Browsing my local bookstore for something easy on the head to read I come across this book.
Kenji is a sex tourist guide and is hired by Frank, an American tourist to show him around the nightlife of Toyko. Kenji on meeting Frank thinks he is strange and when a high school girl is murdered Kenji's mind runs awash with thoughts. Are Kenji suspicions correct and is Frank a cold bloodied murderer?
Having very little knowledge about the Japanese and how they live this book was a good introduction to their culture. The book explores cultural differences, alienation, loliness and the emptyiness of our modern world.
Although this book is short and can be read quickly I think I will read it again as issues arisen seem more complex then first thought.

MY FIRST REVIEW TO BE EDITED!

Twenty-year-old Kenji lives alone in Tokyo. His mom thinks he's enrolled in a cram school and trying to get into college, but he actually works as an unlicensed guide, showing foreigners around the Tokyo sex clubs. But Frank is like no customer Kenji's ever had before, and soon he's more worried about getting out of this three-day job alive than getting paid.

This is the first Ryu Murakami book I've ever read, though I've seen his stuff around a lot. After reading this I'm very interested in reading more. This book was fantastic. I managed to put it down fairly easily after the first part (it's divided into three parts), though I really enjoyed it, but I read parts two and three straight through, unable to put it down. It's a short book, but I don't have that long an attention span, so reading something in one or two sittings is pretty rare for me.

The translation was really good, too. I haven't read the Japanese to compare the content, of course, but it read really naturally in English. I wouldn't have thought it was a translation. ( )

Yowza! What can I say about this book? What should I say? Kenji is a tour guide for foreigners visiting Tokyo, but not your ordinary tour guide; he's a sex industry tour guide specializing in providing excursions into the many different type of sex clubs and shops in the sleazy part of town. His American client, Frank, seems a bit off... let me reword that... His American client, Frank, is seriously fried, screwed up beyond repair! You can hear his brain sizzling like the neon lights in the city. The tour guide slowly becomes the tourist as Frank teaches him a thing or two or five about life.

Written in the first person, Kenji convincingly describes the city and the sleaze. And you really start to feel Kenji's uneasiness and confusion planted and nurtured tenderly by Frank. Ryu Murakami amazingly passes that uneasy feeling to you, the reader, and before you know it things happen, things that will shock you, things that will be hard to erase from your memory. You soon feel that you're a witness to a horrible crime and there's not one damn thing you can do about it.

Last year I read Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates, a book about a serial killer from the serial killer's point of view. Let me just say that reading In the Miso Soup is more unsettling and more distressing. Just know what you're getting into before you read this book.

As for the title... it's a metaphor and only explained on the last page. I can tell you though it will not take away from your pleasure of slurping up a hot bowl of the soup. But if you're in Tokyo, in the Kabuki-cho district, you might want to think twice about going into omiai pub, or matchmaking pub. Lessons learned there may be impossible to forget, especially if you see a big American sitting in the corner.

With this book I have now read all of Ryu Murakami's English translated books. Whew... I need a break.

'When you're a kid, getting lost isn't just an event or a situation, it's like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you've done something that can never be undone. My sense of myself, of my body, would become very shaky, and I'd feel like I was going to melt into the gray fog all around me. A lot of times I'd start screaming. But adults never pay any attention to a a little kid alone on the street just screaming - crying, maybe, but not screaming On this day I was mostly just afraid but still really excited. And then Mama appeared. All of a sudden she pulled up beside me in the car and said: 'Goodness, it's my little boy!' I started bawling, not because I was happy or relieved to see her but because I was scared. I felt like Mama had merged with the Unknown and must therefore be a completely different person. I thought I somehow had to find a way back to the world I knew, and when Mama went to take me in her arms I shook her off and tried to run away. I wasn't supposed to meet up with Mama here, I was only supposed to see her back in the real world, and so this woman couldn't be my real Mama even though she looked just liker her. So when she grabbed me again I bit her on the wrist, so hard that my jaw went numb. I didn't think I had any choice, I didn't know what else to do. Mama was yelling her head off. I guess I bit right through the skin where there was an artery or something, because blood started gushing out into my mouth, lots of it, and I was biting so hard I couldn't breathe, so I gulped it all down, like a baby nursing at its mother's breast, just sucking up the blood. I felt like I had to, like if I didn't drink it all up I'd suffocate. Have you ever swallowed somebody else's blood, Kenji?' ( )

Interesting comments on modern Japanese culture. The 'suspense' seems a bit cheesy and teen-horror at times though. But I think that's because I'm reading it from an occidental viewpoint - the anime-style cover reminded me that comic-books are massively popular in Japan, and this is kind of a comic-style book...without the pictures.... (must learn to think before I write) ( )

A fast adventurous read if you are drawn in or fascinated by the subject matter. We meet Kenji, a young fellow in Japan who takes foreigners on tours of the seedier side of Tokyo for extra income. Hookers, massage parlors, food; you name it, he will set you up. There is also a recent murder of a high school girl who was involved in "compensated dating"; another word for prostitution of sorts. Kenji then meets Frank, an American with a lot of oddities...and lies. What starts as an odd romp through the flesh underworld turns grisly as our suspicions of Frank comes to a head. His mannerisms and attitude grows more alarming and worse page by page. Murakami does not let up during the books most panicked scene and it will make you cringe. Plus there is a constant sense of danger looming as we are more and more suspicious of Frank. A really visual book with some interesting commentary on the modern world, hypocrisy, and double standards as well. This would make a great Miike movie. A great cringer from Murakami. ( )

Set in a strange, inaccessible quarter of Tokyo populated by prostitutes, strippers and low-lifes, Ryu Murakami presents an alien picture of the metropolis that becomes distinctly unsettling. Kenji, the book's main character must charter these waters for his customer, Frank - an odd and increasingly unnerving tourist whose constantly shifting lies cloud what may be murderous truths.

In the Miso Soup is both worthwhile and unsettling - threading through the story are concepts of detachment, alienation, cultural differences and the emptiness of the modern life. At times the novel feels like an odd form of display art, striking chords when it least tries. Frank becomes more and more unsettling throughout the novel, and although it is one gruesome and extremely violent section that will capture the attention, it is his bizarre, unpredictable and uninterpretable mood that makes him truly sinister and oddly hypnotic.

However, the author tries too hard. Frank becomes least interesting when he is supposed to be most dangerous (black eyes and blank looks are two over-used clichés). The main character, Kenji, and his girlfriend, Jun, are so average that their exchanges begin to feel like over-heard mobile phone conversations: realistic, but hardly interesting. Kenji himself is, in the main, bland and uninteresting and although the book is rich in vivid scenes, they can be matched by some forced, stilted paragraphs - how much of this is due to translation is one question, as there occasional phrases which manage to get the wrong end of the stick, e.g. "the popularity of foreigners ... has completely bottomed-out", but "bottomed-out" implies an upturn, so "hit rock bottom" may be more appropriate.

Ultimately "In the Miso Soup" may be an acquired taste: it is unusual, sometimes imperfect, often bursting with surprising flavours ... but it is definitely worth a try. ( )

Really quite dark modern chiller set in the sleazier size of tokyo, a sex tourist and his local guide showing what the city has to offer amidst a background of serial murder and mutilation. ( )

This was a FANTASTIC book. The beginning is a little slow but once Kenji's suspicions are raised about Frank the plot thickens. It is gruesome and gory from the half-way point. Easy reading with convincing, believable characters. This book will now have me hunting out others by the same/similar author(s).

A plot with heaps of cultural corruption looking at how lonliness descends upon us, this is within my top ten so far this year within this genre. ( )

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami is on the surface a gritty hard boiled thriller set in the Kabuki-cho red-light district of Tokyo as the approaching New Year leaves near empty except for the human wreckage of the city. Jimji a young illegal sex tourist guide makes a good but shady living from taking westerners around the girlie bars, peep shows, hookers that allow foreigners.

He meets up with Frank who hires him for three days but from the start Jimji feels something is wrong and he starts to be sucked into an ever deepening nightmare that threatens his and his girl friend existence.

The story is told in the 1st person from Jimji perspective and is based on clear fluid writing equal if not better then Haruki Murakami, which evokes the place and time so that you have a movie in your head. Not necessarily a good thing given some of things that happen.

Beneath the surface is a very different story which leads to conclusions and beginnings that can be misunderstood if psycho thriller is the readers’ sole expectation. We are instead being lead into mediation through the events affecting two desperate characters on what the Western and Japanese experience of loneliness is. The key passage for me is this one.

I remember the American making this particular confession, and the way his voice caught when he said “accept it”. Americans don’t talk about just grinning and bearing it, which is the Japanese approach to so many things. After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you will get through if you just hang in there. I don’t think I could stand the sort of loneliness Americans feel.

Reflect on what is being said here and you will enjoy a taut psychological thriller whose outcome makes perfect sense. Highly recommended ( )

Ugh. Prurient and gruesome. Well-written in terms of style - but there are lots of 'clues' in the first half, which aim to ratchet up the tension, which then go nowhere (the cold, metallic nature of Frank's body?). I didn't buy the philosophical disquisitions on modern anomie or US-Japan relations either... ( )

This book starts out ok, but the whole thing seems to ride on one gory scene that, once over, doesn't get developed into anything terribly satisfying. I dunno, maybe there are layers here that my easy, suburban upbringing doesn't allow me to understand, but I'm fairly certain the book is just average. ( )

This novel shows the gritty and grimy side of Tokyo. I did not know what to expect and wasn't quite prepared for so much violence, but the character development and the descriptions are so vivid and realistic that I was just taken in by the atmosphere and the plot. Very eerie and very scary. ( )

If America is a melting pot (or an “ethnic stew”) then Japan is Miso soup – a bunch of uniform vegetables floating around in a liquid that represents the exotic core values of a nation. At least that is how Frank, the American antagonist in a Japanese novel, describes it. Frank is the client of Kenji, a 20-year old who makes his living giving guided tours of Tokyo’s sex district to gaijin (foreigners). Kenji gets more than he bargained for with this particular client as he begins to suspect that Frank is somehow involved in a series of murders which have recently occurred around the sex district of Kabuki-cho.

Murakami’s style has a bit of a Palahniukian feel to it, framing a story around an esoteric sub-set of the popular culture and eccentric characters to delve into relatively ingenious modes of social criticism. The catch here is that there are two cultures being criticized, American and Japanese, and the criticisms of both are voiced by individuals from both countries. Combine this with Murakami’s own Japanese origins and you have an interesting feed-back loop that allows you to see both cultures from a very different perspective. Because of the graphic nature of the events depicted in the book these existential narratives have an eerily surreal quality to them.

The book can be extremely disturbing at times – this is, after all, from the man who brought us Audition. Not being a stranger to graphic content I was surprised to find myself verging on sickness while reading some of the passages. However this is one of the few cases where I can genuinely say that the gruesomeness is a necessary part of a larger artistic endeavor. Murakami does a brilliant job of making you feel you are there which puts you in the psychological frame of mind of the characters after witnessing such atrocities. As a result I would strongly suggest you read this short novel in a single sitting to get the full experience of the work. In The Miso Soup is quite extraordinary. ( )

Kenji is a regular Japanese guy who works as a sex guide. His latest client is a gaijin, Frank, who is more than just a tad creepy.

Some elements of this book worked wonderfully. You have to go into it looking more at the relationship between Frank & Kenji rather than all the exterior muss (especially the pointless and illogical violence in Part II). If not, one won't "get" the book.

Part III or the conclusion was done beautifully as well. It was one of the most satisfying conclusions to any book ever. ( )

Set in contemporary japan, a sex-tourist guide's client turns out to be the mentally disturbed serial killer that's been popping up in the local news recently.

I disliked the general gore, the meager plot and the pessimistic disposition of the main character made me a bit uneasy.

I liked the characters, especially liked the social commentary, and the vivid descriptions were great. This could have been a much better book than what it was.

I'd reread it only to kill some time, i know what's going to happen already, so most of the fun of trying to predict whether or not the main character will die is gone.

This book encouraged future reading of contemorary japanese fiction, it's fun to compare with western fiction. ( )