Ryu Murakami

It's just before New Year, and Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo's nightlife. But Frank's behaviour is so odd that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: his client may in fact have murderous desires. Although Kenji is far from innocent himself, he unwillingly descends with Frank into an inferno of evil, from which only his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Jun, can possibly save him.

In The Miso Soup

Ryū Murakami

In the miso soup

refreshing bc it was my first time reading horror/thriller and it was actually really fun a little crazy in some parts but i definitely get the hype 

nina 

4.5⭐️

refreshing bc it was my first time reading horror/thriller and it was actually really fun a little crazy in some parts but i definitely get the hype 

that ending is really ambiguous but i guess it gives us a wider perspective on frank and kenji’s relationship… i like to believe that the swan feather might symbolize of frank setting kenji free because he is his “friend”, as a way to break the cycle because he killed a swan before to drink its blood. also, props to kenji’s girlfriend for being so mature and having such strong mentality! i really like their dynamics but it’s just a bit sad that jun is still a minor while having a relationship with a grown man. overall this book is okay.. audition is still so much better for me. 

ayoni

went into this thinking there would be real miso soup

𓆏

i went in blind…. well. i liked the writing style, and the first two chapters were very eventful. #that scene didn’t necessarily catch me off guard bc by then i obviously knew where the story was heading but it was so graphic idk i didn’t expect some of those themes like oh my gosh. the ending felt lacking ? i wasn’t expecting that. kind of a let down. kind of boring but other wise it was good

honestly after thinking about the ending more i quite liked the ending and this read was so good. it had so many different aspects to it too like. it touches on xenophobia, politics, classism etc ALL WHILE BEING THE MOST GUT WRENCHING DISTRUBING BOOK EVER (probably not ever this is just my first horror book) oh my gosh ryu murakami my goat

azaria

i went in blind…. well. i liked the writing style, and the first two chapters were very eventful. #that scene didn’t necessarily catch me off guard bc by then i obviously knew where the story was heading but it was so graphic idk i didn’t expect some of those themes like oh my gosh. the ending felt lacking ? i wasn’t expecting that. kind of a let down. kind of boring but other wise it was good

honestly after thinking about the ending more i quite liked the ending and this read was so good. it had so many different aspects to it too like. it touches on xenophobia, politics, classism etc ALL WHILE BEING THE MOST GUT WRENCHING DISTRUBING BOOK EVER (probably not ever this is just my first horror book) oh my gosh ryu murakami my goat

THE scene was so so graphic that for a moment I was saying to myself wtf

Aris 

The Follow Up To In The Miso Soup, Piercing Confirms Ryu Murakami As The Master Of The Psycho-Thriller Every Night, Kawashima Masayuki Creeps From His Bed And Watches Over His Baby Girl S Crib While His Wife Sleeps. But This Is No Ordinary Domestic Scene. He Has An Ice Pick In His Hand, And A Barely Controllable Desire To Use It. Deciding To Confront His Demons, Kawashima Sets Into Motion A Chain Of Events Seeming To Lead Inexorably To Murder&

In the Miso Soup

Joana Duarte

I wouldn’t say I loved this book, but it is a story I believe I won’t forget soon. 
It is incredibly disturbing and the sense of dread remained even after putting the book down. 
The ending was abrupt, but it was just what the narrative needed. 
Murakami is an extremely talented writer, but I don’t know how soon I’ll go back to his works, if they’re all like this one.

Ghofran Mustafa 

Ryan Mateyk

Wow tbh! I'm not easily disturbed but the Omiai Pub scene is probably THE most disturbing thing I've ever read (maybe not ever, but definitely in awhile). I won't be getting that imagery out of my head for quite some time. This was a neat book, as it started as a taut thriller, steadily building tension leading up to the aforementioned pub scene. Then, it did a full 180 (like Dula Peep) and shifted gears to ruminate on human nature and why we are the way we are. This shift was totally unexpected but really worked. 

I enjoyed this a lot, and will definitely be reading more from Murakami - hopefully his other books are just as smart/twisted.

read this thinking it was cozy so maybe better to read it without knowing anything this was craazyyy

moira

tori 👻

Demon

it was an intriguing book at first, but past the middle it was really confusing and the end? I don't know how to feel about this book, it was long for nothing at the end.

JoAnna

A tightly plotted literary-psychological thriller. The story is both tender and cynical, filled with propulsive scenes that are deftly balanced against philosophical speculation from both protagonists. I found myself growing fond of not only Kenji but Frank as well. This novel is also a really great example of dilating time and defamiliarization on the sentence level. Ending could’ve been a bit stronger, given all the tension, but ultimately I felt it worked well enough. The book also reads like it was written natively in English - McCarthy did a great job with the translation. The novel draws comparisons between American and Japanese culture, and explores the themes of sex work, childhood memory, loneliness, and murder.

The book is super graphic, so if that’s not your thing, maybe skip this one.

i wanna love this book sooo bad… the intense parts Did grip me but the last chapter dragged and the ending was very unsatisfying i fear….like it was trying to make some philosophical point but idk if i just didn’t understand or it was just poorly done. the gorey scene in the middle of the book is how i will remember it as opposed to whatever he was trying to say at the end

Jehan Chawla

It was a captivating read. The writing was addictive, the pacing was really good, also added a bit a philosophical elements in the end; But that's where it ends.
It's a story about grasping out to try and feel something in an uncaring world, and the ways that people try and achieve that.
As a thriller the book is also masterful. The tension built up in the first 100 pages is ridiculously good. You're on the edge of your seat for most of the book just waiting for something to finally snap. 
The characters really shine and seem authetic even the side characters don't seem like a caricature portrait for plotting. 
I really have a problem with the ending; even though I was enjoying the philosophical dialogues between the two Characters, the ending was really abrupt and not in a good ambiguous kind of way. 
If I'm being honest I still feel a bit mixed about the rating of this novel.

jess larry

Chilling, frightening, was losing my mind along with Kenji. 

Have to admit it felt a bit boring at times. Took me longer than planned to finish. 
But that may also be because I was too anxious about what was going on to keep on reading lol. 
No but it was seriously so tense at times that’s crazy. 

An interesting take on mental insanity embodied by Frank. I enjoyed the portrait of Japan’s night life & lonely souls as well. 

The ending was a bit lacking though and some scenes were a tad too graphic but ig that’s what I signed for.

In theory, this is a really interesting plot line - a foreign tourist in Japan looking to experience the nightlife, with help from a young guide. However I just didn’t seem to be as gripped as a I thought I would be. 

Rose

Chaku Dranzer

To sum it up:


1st chapter - mystery/suspense
2nd chapter - horror/gore
3rd chapter - philosophy 


Trust me worth reading

entertaining and a quick read, but you know who the villain is literally from the first page 

Kwan Ann Tan

High Fidelity

Pročitajte zbog Frenka kojeg nikada nećete zaboraviti.

Iris Emily

Leila Jade

Ashlyn

*In the Miso Soup* sounds like the title of a book that should be cozy, right? Wrong! This is a pretty messed up book, and very interesting to read immediately after *The Wasp Factory* (totally random timing). I much prefer this Murakami to the more popular one.

Kayleigh hughes

As has become my standard travel preference, I headed over to Japan with a bunch of books on the kindle app on my phone (I decided to leave my actual kindle at home) and a single physical copy book. And as usual, I tired of this arrangement pretty quickly. I don't know about everyone else, but as convenient as ebooks are I find I tire of reading off an electronic device far quicker than if it's an actual book. I think it might be tied to how often I use my phone to procrastinate, so I've programmed myself to feel to need to flick through things as quickly as possible. I hardly needed a lot of encouragement to dart into a bookstore and look for a new book to read, so when I saw a Kinokuniya in Sapporo I decided to see what their English language section had to offer.

I might have bought The Sisters Brothers, but what I really wanted was a book by a Japanese author. There is something amazingly cool about reading a book as you're travelling around where the book is set. It adds a level of personal investment that you simply don't get if you read it back home and it cements that book with that country in your memory, so future re-reads are always happy visits down memory lane. Aside from some English translations of traditional Japanese poetry and folklore the only real offering was Haruki Murakami, who is far too readily available in Australia to be special enough for a Japanese purchase,* and Banana Yoshimote and Ryu Murakami (no relation to Haruki). Since I've read (and adored) Yoshimoto that really only left Ryu Murakami - which I was 100% okay with because the blurbs on all of his books sounded brilliant. What I got from the covers of In the Miso Soup, Coin Locker Babies and Piercing is that Murakami is basically the Japanese equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson, rolling fictional narratives with unflinchingly accurate depictions of the underbelly of Japanese (and particularly Tokyo) life and culture. Yes please, gimmie gimmie gimmie.

In the Miso Soup is a sharp and slick peek into the apathetic life of Tokyo youngster Kenji. 20 years old, Kenji works as a tourist guide in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Except rather than guide Americans and English tourists around the shopping district or to the nearest shrine, Kenji specialises in sex tourism. When foreigners come to Japan and want to knock boots in the seedy and kinky Tokyo sex industry, Kenji guides them through Kabuki-cho, a brightly-lit district in Shinjuku that's full of love hotels, yakuza-run bars and prostitutes. Kenji is disillusioned, disinterested and despondent working in this industry, but it helps him get closer to his dream of having enough money to move to America and start a new life. Frank is Kenji's latest client. American, overweight and with a weird plastic shine to his skin, Frank creeps Kenji out from the outset. But money is money, and one creep is no different to the rest.

The book covers the three nights Kenji spends with Frank, and over the 200 pages you fall headlong into the turbulence of the Tokyo sex industry, shuffling between disaffected youths, antagonistic pimps and gangsters and the slow-building tension between Kenji and his American client. Everything is awash with a general sense of unease but because everything is so foreign and dirty and awkward it's hard to know if Frank is actually as unsettling as Kenji seems to find him, or if everything is just being heightened in the unhappy mind of Kenji as he comes to realise how little he likes this world. As the narrative unfolds and Frank questions Kenji about Japanese customs and the Tokyo scene it becomes clear that Kenji sees Japanese culture as littered with problems. Whether it's the high school girls selling their time (but not their bodies) to the highest bidder, not for a need for stimulation or for money but because they're lonely and are looking for something, or the unsettling salary men and karoshi careers, Kenji seems determined to push against everything that's accepted as natural in Japan but also seems unaware of how to go about it. He's floundering and unhappy.
“Very few people of our generation or the next will reach adulthood without experiencing the sort of unhappiness you can't really deal with on your own. We're still in the minority, so the media lump us together as "The Oversensitive Young", or whatever the latest catchphrase is, but eventually that will change.”
But perhaps the best part of the book is how well Murakami, 45 years old at the time of writing, manages to write as a young disillusioned Japanese man, a 35 year old American man and successfully display each character's confusion, apprehension and misunderstanding about the other's culture. The cultural and generational divide between the two men acts as a point of separation but it also performs as a way for each man to come to terms with their own identity and that of their country. Through Frank's confusion or disgust Kenji finds himself questioning parts of Japan that he hadn't thought to question before. But by learning more about America through Frank, Kenji also comes to realise that the grass isn't always greener, and at the end of the day maybe everyone, everywhere, is equally fucked up.
“After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born Japanese. The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different from the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there."
I've been tiptoeing pretty hard around the actual plot of this book, partially because it's one that's better to go into knowing next to nothing about but also because it's so unpredictable and thrilling that I'd basically have to lay it all out from start to finish to avoid making it sound fractured and disastrous. So vague as this review may be, just trust me when I say it is excellent and you need to find out for yourself what the book is really about. And from someone who has just spent three weeks walking around many of the streets mentioned in this book, let me just assure you that it's a complete and fascinating look at a part of Japan that you might not encounter otherwise. While it emphasises the less than savoury aspects of Japanese (and in particular, Tokyo) culture and night time proclivities, it also paints a picture of a bustling, colourful, sometimes dangerous and always bizarre city that has to be seen to believed. It's a glimpse into another time and place, and I loved it.

*Although I actually did go back and buy one of his books later.

weird as hell BUT i like the writing style. 

In The Miso Soup

Reviews