Latest Review: "Popular Hits of the Showa Era" by Ryu Murakami

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Ryu Murakami’s Popular Hits of the Showa Era, which is forthcoming from Norton in Ralph McCarthy’s translation.

As Will points out, in America, Ryu is the “other Murakami,” but he’s quite popular in Japan, and a good number of his dark, strange books have made their way into English.

In case you don’t remember him, Will was an intern for Open Letter last year and has written a number of reviews on Japanese fiction.

Here’s the opening of his piece on Popular Hits of the Showa Era:

Ryu Murakami is sometimes referred to as the “other” Murakami, the yang to the more internationally popular Haruki Murakami’s yin. But in Japan, the so-called “other” Murakami is just a strong a force in the contemporary literary scene. Ryu Murakami has won almost all the big literary prizes in Japan, including the Akutagawa, the Yomiuri, and the Tanizaki Junichiro twice, and with numerous film adaptations of his work, including the critically acclaimed, cult film Audition, Ryu is one of Japan’s most popular and recognizable names in literature today.

In Popular Hits of the Showa Era, his latest to be translated into English, Murakami takes the idea of the “battle of the sexes” to its darkest and most absurd extremes. The novel follows the misadventures of two rival camps: a group of wayward, twenty-something year-old males who have almost nothing in common with each other except their severe lack of social skills and a semi-regular party they throw, in which they all dress up in costumes and record themselves singing karaoke to old pop songs on a deserted beach; and the “Midori Society,” a group of oba-sans, or middle-aged women, who have just as little in common with each other as their male counterparts besides their shared name Midori and the failures of their romantic relationships. When one of the men sexually assaults and then murders one of the Midoris, a twisted and ludicrous inter-generational gender war begins, which over the course of this slight novel rapidly escalates until its absurd and shocking conclusion.

Click here to read the full piece.