Gentle yet repellent from bookish, a weblog by George Girton

Gentle yet repellent . . . . . sep 28 2004 — bookish112.dat

What is the miso soup we are all swimming in? I hope it is nothing like the bits and pieces of this gentle yet repellent modern-day Japanese slasher novel. I picked this up in the library, carelessly mistaking it for a book by an entirely different Murakami. For my mental carelessness I received a shock to the system.

The novel starts out gently enough, the narration is readable and the narrator is likeable. He's a tour guide for foreigners visiting Tokyo's tawdry sex club scene. His mother thinks he's in college. Soon enough he picks up an unusual customer, a gaijin named Frank who really gives him the creeps. He'll give you the creeps, too, and if you like suspense in a novel, maybe this is not such a bad choice. Pretty soon you worry something bad is going to happen. My own worry was assuaged by the hope that the horrifying events I knew must be right around the corner might turn out to be not completely real. Or they might be reversible. Sad to say, my false sense of security was lulled by the fact that I thought it was a completely different Murakami writing!

So imagine my disgust when, innocently walking down the street reading the book while walking the dog, (warning, I'm about to give things away here), I find that Frank has killed about five people in a really gross and repellent way. To make matters worse, one of the dog-walking ladies in the neighborhood came up to me at that point with her two dogs and said, "What are you reading? Is it any good?" At that point I felt like throwing up.

Murakami did raise an interesting point, though. When his character is confronted with this psychotic killer, something which of course almost never happens to anyone in the course of everyday life, he becomes helpless. He doesn't run screaming out the door, he doesn't call the cops, he is somehow able to keep conversing with Frank. He finds out more about Frank, and, out of overwhelming fear, takes him to hear the New Year's bells at a quiet bridge with his girlfriend (not Frank's girlfriend, to be sure).

Notwithstanding its insights into the fringes of contemporary Japanese life, except for all but the most strong-stomached among you, I cannot recommend In the Miso Soup [buy at amazon] , a graphic and suspenseful modern horror novel by Ryu Murakami.

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