Ryu Murakami, "the cult Japanese author and filmmaker whose subversive, blackly comic novels found millions of readers," died October 17 at age 74, the Guardian reported. Murakami "incorporated violence, explicit drug use and sex into stories that offered a sharp-eyed critique of Japanese and American culture."
Murakami's first novel, Almost Transparent Blue (1976), was written while he was still a student and won the Gunzo prize for new writers as well as the Akutagawa prize. The Guardian noted that it is "narrated by a character called Ryū, and depicts the hedonistic lifestyle of a group of disillusioned, nihilistic young people."
Murakami published more than 40 novels and short story collections, including In the Miso Soup, Audition, Piercing, and Popular Hits of the Showa Era. His third book, Coin Locker Babies, about infants abandoned in storage lockers, won the Noma literary new face prize. The novel is "a surreal coming-of-age horror story that runs wildly through the heights of love and superstardom, and the lows of insanity and murder," wrote Russell Thomas in the Guardian in 2020, selecting it as one of the best books set in Japan. "Murakami's stories never shy away from shining a light on the darkest corners of society," he added.
Many of his works, including Tokyo Decadence and Almost Transparent Blue, have been adapted for screen, either by himself or others. The best-known is Audition, directed by Takashi Miike, which features a widower holding fake movie auditions in order to find a new girlfriend. Writing about it in 2009, Irvine Welsh described the novel's prose as "elegiac and affecting, but it has the sharp, visceral feel of the butcher's knife or surgeon's scalpel." Audition is available in the U.S. from Norton.
In 2013, journalist David Pilling pointed out the difference between Murakami and his better-known--though unrelated--namesake, Haruki Murakami, writing that Ryu Murakami's books are "edgier and angrier.... If Haruki is the Beatles of Japanese literature, Ryu is its Rolling Stones."
