Piercing By Ryu Murakami

Lets get to the point shall we (and I can assure you no pun was intended there.)
The premise of “Piercing by Ryu Murakami” is that of a father trying to cap the urge to impale his newly born daughter in the stomach with an ice pick. By cleverly hiring a call girl who goes by the name of Chiaki, luring her to a hotel room and piercing her in the stomach instead…….oh and before I forget, he also wants to hear the sound of the Chiakis Achilles tendons popping as he slices through them with a large hunting knife. Our protagonist or piercer goes by the name of Kawashima Masayuki and he hopes that this little act of murder will put and end to his sociopath like tendencies towards his daughter.

The story is told from the perspective of both individuals.


With a book like this you would expect it to ooze a visceral like quality from every page if it is going to even come close to pulling a degree of reaction out of you. After all we as a society are so used to seeing dark and graphic imagery almost everyday so we don’t even bat an eyelid when faced with a scene of destruction or something of a gruesome nature ….. and this is unfortunately where our story loses its edge.

As you can probably guess Mr Ryu Murakami’s primary language is not English so what we have here is a direct translation of his work by a man called Ralph McCarthy (you may think I’m rambling but I can assure you this is all necessary and relevant) . Now this is where we start to run into problems with the translation. Euphemisms, plenty this book has but seem so incredible wasted when a moment later he goes on to explain, the comparison between the two. Giving you the feeling that your reading some pre high school tripe. The premise is wonderfully dark and Ryu paints an incredible picture of Tokyo with the majority of the descriptive passages. You can hear the traffic, smell the food, feel the rain and the sense of foreboding as our character walks the desolate streets but (yeah I know there is always a but) during the translation you get the feeling that things have been lost or mixed or simplified or over complicated.
All is not lost though what saves this book in many ways is the constant flitting between the two characters. Giving you a wonderful insight into these two thoroughly detached individuals. Him with his obsession to pierce porcelain flesh with cold hard steel and her, with her addiction to Halcyon and no sex drive (which for a call girl I feel was a very nice touch.)
Like I said the translation can be sloppy in places and can really take the edge of some of the later chapters, where the constant chopping and changing of characters perspective and the ensuing power struggle seems almost wishy washy with over explained situations.
I know it sounds like I’m knocking this book, but I’m not. In comparison to a lot of similar work which is flooding the literary world at the moment this seems to stand out because there is something so inherently likable about the child abuse scenes mid book and the discovery of some deep rooted sexual longings towards the end. Also the way that Murakami opens the book with a seemingly innocent act of a father watching over his new born baby as she sleeps only to quickly turn it around imbuing the reader with a sense of dread as you find out our fathers real reason for standing there, ice pick in hand, sweat pouring from his face.
All in all the books story alone holds up and yeah I know what your thinking “work of fiction, story should hold up” but how many times have you picked a book up just to put it back down again midway through on the account that it was absolute horse cock? Plenty I imagine.

The book only clocks in at 183 pages and took me little over 3 hours to read. So if you have a spare 3 hours and can overlook the unnecessary over explanation of things I recommend it.