Foreign-language novelists who have success in the American market tend to have one trait in common: a veneration of American pop culture. Stieg Larsson is fond of gangster films; Umberto Eco opines about comic books, “Starsky & Hutch” and pornography; Roberto Bolaño plumps for Mark Twain, David Lynch and “Easy Rider”; and Haruki Murakami drops the Lovin’ Spoonful, Cream, Duke Ellington, Herb Alpert, Burt Bacharach, J. D. Salinger, Raymond Carver and several thousand other proper nouns.
It would appear that Ryu Murakami has cracked the formula. Born in 1952, he is Haruki Murakami’s contemporary (though not kin), a child of the ’60s with an unabashed affection for American rock music, jazz and sitcoms. His autobiographical novel, “69,” is about a student uprising he led during high school inspired by the Beats, Eldridge Cleaver and the lyrics of Lou Reed.
But the target of his rebellion was the United States naval base that occupied Sasebo, the western Japanese port city in which he grew up. And his first novel, “Almost Transparent Blue” (1976), which has sold more than two million copies in Japan, is about the violent, seedy underworld that panders to the desires of the occupying American soldiers.
Mr. Murakami left Sasebo and settled in Tokyo, but this theme carried over. The narrator of “In the Miso Soup” (1997) is a tourist handler in Tokyo’s red light district who can’t tell whether a peculiar client is a serial killer or simply a typical lonely American man. (As it turns out, he’s both.) These novels’ view of America, and Americans, is deeply conflicted; often the United States is portrayed as a blundering monster — not evil so much as dangerously ignorant.
Japan doesn’t come off any better. In Mr. Murakami’s new “Popular Hits of the Showa Era,” all of the characters suffer from a kind of national cabin fever. They share a deranged obsession with saccharine pop music and television melodramas, but are devoid of personal ambition, social ability or even self-awareness.
This short novel is the story of a war between two factions that stand in for different segments of Japanese society. The first is a group of puerile men in their mid-20s. They gather in the evenings to slurp down junk food and peep at a woman in the neighboring apartment tower. Sometimes they drive down the coast to a deserted beach where they dress in drag and perform elaborate karaoke numbers. But mostly they babble incoherently to themselves, bursting “into mindless and uncontrollable laughter at random moments” and “not necessarily about anything in particular.”
What unites them, Mr. Murakami writes, is that “they’d all given up on committing positively to anything in life.” At times they barely seem human: “Ishihara’s eyes didn’t resemble those of any other member of the human race — or any known reptile or amphibian or bird or fish or protozoan or movie alien either, for that matter. His eyelids made a clicking sound each time he blinked … like the sound glass makes when it cracks.” They are not people so much as anime characters. Read more
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