Product Description

It's just before New Year. Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's nightlife on three successive evenings. But Frank's behaviour is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: that his client may be in fact the killer currently terrorizing the city. Kenji is a likeable, if far from innocent guide, leading the reader through the inferno of violence and evil into which he apparently unwillingly descends - and from which only Jun, his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, can possibly save him. Kenji's intimate knowledge of Tokyo's sex industry, his thoughtful observations and wisecracks, his insights into the emptiness and hypocrisy of contemporary Japan, and his ultimate moral paralysis and complicity reveal a deeply distressed and rotten modern world that seems to have lost its way in search of pleasure and instant gratification.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #267672 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-07
• Original language: Japanese
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

Review
'A blistering portrait of contemporary Japan, its nihilism and decadence wrapped up within one of the most savage thrillers since THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.' Kirkus Review 'Deft and fascinating a grisly tour of the darkness and confusion of the human mind.' The New York Times 'In the Miso Soup is quality pulp made out of Japan's crushed, dark heart: our pride, it suggests, is matched only by our self-hatred In the Miso Soup often reads like a collaboration between Stephen King and Michel Houellebecq, with off-key karaoke going on in the background. He gives you shocking blood-violence, but the social critique is never far behind.' LA Weekly 'His latest oozes darkness and ambiguity and reads like a cross-Pacific bullet train.' Entertainment Weekly

Kirkus Reviews
‘One of the most savage thrillers since The Silence of the Lambs. Shocking but gripping’

Independent
‘This compelling, slippery novel – as slippery as the monster at its heart – slides unnervingly through the registers’

Customer Reviews

Strange, unpleasant and essential reading.
Murakami wrote the screenplay for the deeply nasty film "Audition".

I have to say that I didn't know this when I first read this book, which I picked up on the strength of one of his other books "Coin locker Babies" (which I picked up in mistake for a Haruki Murakami novel... a happy error!).

This book is every bit as nasty.

I will give nothing away, except to say that the book gives a completely convincing account of contemporary Tokyo and the place of the outsider within it, be that outsider foreign or one of the many "underclass" who seem to wander the streets of the city, and that once you have started it, you will be reading non-stop to the end.

Miso Soup
Started well with a lot of promise and mystery.
Enjoyed it alot with alot of expectation for the ending. Nice writing style too, though could have been more sensitive in places.

However, for me, the ending for me was too simple.

Once it had built up to the climactic halfway point all the questions in your mind that made the story extraordinary and exciting were simply answered.
In place of the earlier excitement was a generally more philosophical tone that was too subtle and underplayed to be engaging and failed to add anything essential or valueable.

I got well into the book and couldn't put it down, but after The Main Event of the story, my continued enthusiasm was not well rewarded.

In the Miso Soup
What at a glance appears to be a fairly standard concept for a novel - is our protagonists client the serial killer at large? - is taken in a very different direction by the time the story ends. It's a direction that I can only imagine a Japanese author taking it: disturbing but poignant, and maybe a little frustrating in its ambiguity - though it's the frustrating things that are ultimately most rewarding. Of course only a Japanese author could have written it because the novel is essentially about the closed nature of Japan's society: alienating to foreigners and in a state of self-denial.

I'm usually a slow reader but this novel hooked me in from the start and I finished it in less than 24 hours. The writing style is much more fluid and rich than other Japanese novels I've read, such as Haruki Murakami's, though I'm never sure exactly how much of that is down to the translator rather than the original author. The author does, however, clearly have excellent ability when it comes to the pacing. Perhaps around the last third of the novel it loses its narrative drive, but the change to a slower, more thoughtful style is what gives the book its unique edge, taking it from being simply a gripping read to a novel that leaves a lasting impression and screams out to be read again.