Piercing

Piercing is about a man, a woman, and a sharp object. It reads fast. It jabs fast. And the writer doesn't care how you feel about it. I'm not going to bother tracing out the plot, because accepting or rejecting Ryu Murakami's work depends more on how perverse you find the world. In Japan, a shame-based society preoccupied with public image, Murakami's serial-murder of literary normality has been a relief to people exhausted by the old culture of tip-toeing around the truth. If you're like me and have lost the ability to digest the mind-f--k propaganda of our own sugar-and-caffeine culture, Piercing is a welcomed breath of raw air. Murakami hides nothing, he fakes nothing, he lies about nothing. His morality is grounded only in exposure. His treatment forces you to pay attention ... or run away. Many readers, both Japanese and American, will undoubtedly continue to misunderstand Murakami's work -- or will simply be repulsed by it. But he isn't writing for these readers. He writes for those of us trying to get beyond too much Hollywood fluff, too little coffee in our Starbucks cream shakes, and an over abundance of commercially-conditioned, puritanically-correct, life-affirming values, none of which comfort the tortured souls in Piercing. Having read several of Ryu Murakami's novels, Piercing is one of my favorites.

This book about two damaged people who have nothing in common and are not willing to share their pain either is really beautiful. I couldn't stop reading. I was only hoping for a real ending but I wouldn't want a sad ending, while stories like this never really have a happy one.

I'm not going to recapitulate what happens in the book. I've been a death investigator for 35 years now, especially the pathology of homicide, and have talked to a number of serial killers...this book still managed to terrify me. Murikami's ability to get into the amoral mind of a potential killer is amazing and the novel reaches such intense levels at times that I had to put it down and rest. Murikami's prose is always delicious but this is a true tour de force.

Kawashima Masayuki seems like a decent enough fellow. He has a steady job, an advertisement illustrator, and he has a lovely wife named Yoko who has recently given birth to his daughter Rie. In fact, Masayuki is financially stable enough to set up a small baking school in his home for his wife who worked as a professional baker before giving birth. However, Masayuki suffers from one small problem. Every night for at least ten days or so Masayuki has hovered over his daughter's crib holding an ice pick near his newborn's body, even lightly scratching her cheek with its tip accidentally when his wife startled him one night. With his head filled with aromas that smell of burning yarn or burning finger nails, Masayuki somehow manages each night not to stab and kill his young daughter. As the novel unfolds, we learn that Masayuki's mother was highly abusive when he was young especially after his father died. He had a younger brother also, but he was the only one abused because he resembled his father. During his numerous beatings, Masayuki learned how to separate his mind from his body in order not to feel the pain. Because he didn't cry out, his mother would become even more enraged and beat him more. Masayuki was eventually put in a home for abused children where he would remain for years. He would not meet his mother again until his high school graduation and at that moment in time he was able to do something that he had yearned to do for years: he hit his mother as hard as he possibly could. Troubles continued until he was nineteen-years-old. At that time he was in an abusive relationship with a thirty-eight year old prostitute and spent much of his time high on paint thinner. Their relationship ended one night when he stabbed her in the stomach with an ice pick. As one of the voices in his head tells him, he needs to stab another woman, this time killing her, to take away the desire to kill his daughter. Masayuki decides that is what he is going to do, and he begins a methodical plan to kill an S & M prostitute. However, he gets a little bit more than what he bargains for. Often referred to as the "other" Murakami in some literary circles because he shares the same family name as Murakami Haruki, Murakami Ryu burst into the Japanese world of letters when he wrote his debut novel Almost Transparent Blue back in 1976 which eventually garnered him the coveted Akutagawa prize and since then he has written several novels, including the magnificent Coin Locker Babies and Audition the basis for the Miike Takashi film of the same name, short story collections, directed a number of films, and even hosted a television show. Murakami's novels tend to be quite graphic in sex and violence, but it is not completely gratuitous. His books attempt to unmask the true brutality that remains dormant in humans and shows what might happen once these limits are broken. He is also quite good at building suspense. Several times while I was reading the novel, especially