The story follows Kenji, a young freelance Tokyo tour guide who takes an American businessman called Frank around town on a ‘sex tour’ of the city’s nightlife during the lead-up to New Year’s Eve. There are one or two things that seem amiss with Kenji’s new customer from the start but Kenji rejects the alternative of a quiet time with his girlfriend in favour of some much-needed work. He soon begins to regret his decision to accept this lucrative offer when a darker and more dangerous side to Frank begins to emerge.

The impersonal labyrinth of crowded streets and shady establishments provides a great backdrop to the events of the novel, and needless to say provide an excellent atmosphere of unease and foreboding. Murakami’s prose is excellent at whipping up the tension with a clear and no-nonsense style that gets straight to the point and makes it a real page-turner during its relatively short length; the concise, clear language fits the youth and cynicism of the narrator and the first-person viewpoint draws you into the vibrant yet seedy world he lives in.

The reason why I don’t think it likely that In the Miso Soup will make the transition to film very easily, for all its David Fincher-esque overtones, is that the most visceral and shocking moment occurs partway through and the narrative proceeds to fall back into simmering tension and introspection afterwards. The Hitchcock-style climatic scene that marked the end of Audition is instead replaced by its return to focus on cultural and personal issues, which makes the initial impression of it being a gory nailbiter a bit misleading.

This is a psychological thriller in some respects but it feels more like a social commentary piece trying to pass itself off as a psycho-thriller: it tosses in an episode of graphic violence that fits in with the course of the events but that event feels excessive in its brutality to the point of being gratuitous. I don’t feel like I’m giving a massive spoiler in pointing out to you that the guy who calls himself Frank is indeed very weird and potentially very dangerous; it’s highlighted very early on so doesn’t give as much of a twist as, say, Audition‘s Asami Yamazaki.

As a purely suspenseful piece In the Miso Soup is a bit of an anticlimax because its real intentions aren’t so much shock and tension; rather, it gives frequent insights into both Kenji’s and Frank’s heads during their journeys through the city and makes some pot shots at contemporary Japanese culture along the way. Kenji is in an unsavoury job, as many people he knows are, in order to escape: in his case he wants to move to the US. And yet, it’s also easy to argue that these people drifted into the situations they’re in; the big question is of course how voluntarily their decisions were.

I’m not convinced that modern Japan is a culture coming apart at the seams but I’m noticing a higher profile of the outspoken writers such as the two Murakamis in recent years, which suggests to me that the issues they address are more universal and far-reaching than just modern Japan and the problems it faces. Many of the people and situations seen in this novel – overworked salarymen, bored teenagers, seedy nightclubs, enjo kousai and so on – are more associated with Japan than anywhere else but the significance of the pervading themes of isolation and loneliness in today’s world goes without saying.

The sense of isolation shared by many of the characters is the cause and driving force of many events in the novel, so it’s appropriate that the story unfolds at the most lonely time of year: it’s when In The Miso Soup goes into introspection mode that it comes into its own. After the hair-raising middle portion I gave up on mentally preparing myself for more terrors and turned my attention to this instead, which turned out to be the correct course I think. After the unsettling feelings subsided I was left musing over a lot of things that I never expected a novel such as this to concentrate so keenly on.

Kenji and Frank, or more specifically the peculiar friendship that develops says a lot about how Japanese and Americans perceive one another; the culture gap exploration yields some interesting questions that are more rewarding when interpreted your own way rather than have me give my own, probably inaccurate, conclusions.

When the novel is as realistically gritty and as analytical as this, a considerable suspension of disbelief is unfortunately required because there’s a lot about Frank’s character that is at odds with this realism: basically a lot of him simply doesn’t add up. Even after discarding the façade of lies and make-believe it’s still hard to believe that someone like Frank can continue to live in the real world, let alone get by undetected and wander around in a foreign country. Given how true-to-life everything else around him seems, the fact that he’s a caricature rather than a character is a little jarring.

It’s common to leave antagonists’ backgrounds partially in the shadows to maintain their mystique and there are some lengthy explanations given for the way Frank is. Even so, it’s unsatisfying to be presented with someone so larger-than-life and unnatural with only their own childhood reminiscences to go on. Maybe I’m missing the point there in that Frank is supposed to be seen as a metaphor as many of the issues and situations examined here are, but he still feels out-of-place in the wrong ways as well as the right ones. I’d be interested to hear your take on it.

Takashi Miike’s feature film adaptation of Audition acquired a cult following, which to my shame still sits on my ‘to watch’ list. On the flipside, reading the original novel first sits well with my personal preference for experiencing the original before any adaption, so I now feel even more eager to see Miike’s take on the story. RM’s novel is the tale of Aoyama, a man who has lived several years as a single parent following the death of his wife Ryoko. His son Shige suggests he should remarry so with the help of his friend Yoshikawa he looks for a suitable candidate under the pretext of a bogus film audition; a ruse that introduces him to the enigmatic Asami Yamazaki.

Granted, I’d heard of this novel through the reputation of the film and after seeing a hardback edition in my local Waterstones with a couple of lengthy night shifts ahead of me I decided to take the plunge. It’s not a particularly long novel, and the pace is pitched perfectly to give a brisk yet satisfying read. I never know whether I’m praising the original writer or the translator when highlighting the quality of the prose in a foreign-language novel like this but it’s lively and vivid, without coming across as clumsy or contrived.

Aoyama is interestingly portrayed as a decent yet flawed character, who is shown to have overcome the grief of losing his wife and is raising his son as an independent and respectable young man. Aoyama was not completely faithful to his late wife however, and we learn early on that he had more than one extra-marital affair before her death. The loss had some subtle effects on the husband and son though, who have a realistically awkward relationship and whose respective outlooks on life changed after her passing. The attention to detail in the backgrounds for Aoyama and Shige aren’t necessarily relevant to the content that follows, but give the reader a good grasp on their personalities and offer some telling observations on modern society by the author.

This is a psycho-thriller after all, which is why I was so pleased to see the tension handled so well. There are some subtle bits of foreshadowing tossed in, producing cracks in the flawless image of the new woman in Aoyama’s life, but needless to say he’s the last person to notice. If there’s one thing I’d mark against the novel it’s the amount of development that’s given to Asami Yamazaki’s character: she is portrayed as the harmless, fragile individual at first and a merciless, twisted one later on with no middle ground. The information about the nature and origins of her character are also shown in a detached way that doesn’t allow the reader to see things from her own point of view too clearly.

This didn’t work well me but I suspect it’s intentional that we see her from quite a significant emotional distance: interestingly she is almost always referred to by her full name throughout the novel. Only once is she called ‘Asami-chan’ and even then it’s not in a serious context; she’s never referred to in the text as ‘Ms Yamazaki’ either. The mystique surrounding her prevented me empathising with her as much as I would have liked, but along with the sketchy details she gives about her early life it keeps her motives and feelings concealed, making her seem all the more mysterious and ultimately more dangerous.

The middle portion of the novel plays out like a typical romance story but those moments of foreshadowing cast a dark cloud and make it obvious that things are going to go very wrong. The idea of a fake audition seemed like a dishonest and dubious basis for a romance to me anyway but can an honest relationship be based on a lie? That is an interesting question but is sadly set aside for another, albeit more shocking and interesting revelation. Asami Yamazaki is indeed too good to be true as Yoshikawa fears but the end result is worse than he, or the unsuspecting reader, could imagine…

The finale of the story was a surprise to me, and a brilliantly gruesome and suspenseful one at that. At times like this the quality of the writer’s (and translator’s) prose is paramount, and fortunately didn’t disappoint here. The steady build-up is followed by a brutal and quite abrupt conclusion: I’m not surprised in the slightest that it was given the cinematic treatment because the storytelling and atmosphere carry the same feelings of tension, menace and edge-of-your seat suspense that you’d expect from the best in the thriller genre.

It reminded me a lot of Hitchock actually – I know that’s quite a bold statement but the portrayal of hidden identities, the danger lurking just out of the view of the protagonist, not to mention terrifying situation that marks the end of the story, reminded me a lot of the seminal movies such as Rear Window. The trade-off between consistent characterisation and sheer nailbiting atmospherics is unavoidable really, but in this case it pays off.

Summary

The brevity and pitch of Audition makes for a hard-hitting and exciting read, albeit at the expense of some minor details. Is this a cynical and misogynistic exploitation of the femme fatale archetype to give some cheap kicks? I don’t know much about Ryu Murakami the writer, but at least here I’d not be giving him enough credit if I were to dismiss it so easily. It’s enjoyable as a psychological thriller, but also feels gleefully subversive in that the villain of the piece is on a twisted path of revenge in a society that made her into the monster she is. The moral questioning and social commentary are a fascinating aside but the visceral and gripping prose is first and foremost what I’d recommend it for.