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Loading... In the Miso Soup (original 1997; edition 2006)by Ryu Murakami, Ralph McCarthy (Translator)
Work InformationIn the Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami (1997)
Japanese Literature (27) Diverse Horror (30) » 9 more Best of World Literature (173) Books Read in 2014 (1,243) Books Read in 2015 (3,001) Books for Birute (11) Loading...
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really easy to read. I think ryu is my fav murakami! ( ) I loved Audition and its film adaptation, so I naturally assumed In the Miso Soup would have the same haunting, psychological quality. Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems with In the Miso Soup which threw off the plot development. I found myself more emotionally invested in Kenji and Frank on page 10 than I did on page 150. 1) Frank's brain tissue issue makes it harder for me as a reader to see him as a monster with any real agency, which transfigures a horror story into a mere neurological curiosity. 2) The pub murder scene makes the mystery of who murdered the girl near Shinjuko anticlimactic. 3) Moreover, the language used to describe this scene reminds me of what kids used to write when I taught creative writing classes. A lot of gore, very little pathos. You have to make characters before you make corpses. This book's rating was only due to Murakami's excellent descriptions of terror/fear, and the book's potential. 2 stars otherwise. The gist of the plot is that an American tourist hires a guide to walk him through Tokyo's red-light district - and the guide realizes that his client is not all he is cracked up to be, and he might be the serial killer terrorizing the city. What follows are ruminations on Japanese society à la Fight Club, and a threadbare plot about everything and nothing that is surprisingly banal despite its rather gory descriptions. Murakami tries hard, he really does. The descriptions of Tokyo are vivid, and some tangents on why Japanese society is the way it is does manage to grab you - but the pacing is all over the place ( extremely frenetic in some parts and slow as molasses in the others), and the length was too short, making the last quarter of the book seem like Murakami's attempt to cram a full book's worth of material in those pages, which unsurprisingly doesn't work. If you can handle uneven pacing and gruesome digressions on morality, then go for it - it's worth the read. Not worth the time in any other case. no reviews | add a review
It is just before New Year's. Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's sleazy nightlife on three successive evenings. But Frank's behavior is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: that his new client is in fact the serial killer currently terrorizing the city. It isn't until the second night, however, in a scene that will shock you and make you laugh and make you hate yourself for laughing, that Kenji learns exactly how much he has to fear and how irrevocably his encounter with this great white whale of an American will change his life. Kenji's intimate knowledge of Tokyo's sex industry, his thoughtful observations and wisecracks about the emptiness and hypocrisy of contemporary Japan, and his insights into the shockingly widespread phenomena of "compensated dating" and "selling it" among Japanese schoolgirls, give us plenty to think about on every page. Kenji is our likable, if far from innocent, guide to the inferno of violence and evil into which he unwillingly descends-and from which only Jun, his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, can possibly save him... No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)895.635Literature Literature of other languages Asian (east and south east) languages Japanese Japanese fiction 1945–2000LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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