Ryu Murakami, Who Walked the Monsters Out Into Daylight, Dies at 74

As a high-school student, Ryu Murakami played drums in a rock band. Then he joined a protest on a roof, and the authorities placed him under house arrest for three months ^[1].

That is almost all the record gives of his teenage rebellion, and it is enough. A boy goes up on a roof to make a point, and the point costs him a season of his life indoors. He would spend the next five decades writing about people who could not tell where the roof ended and the drop began.

Murakami died at home on October 17, aged 74, his publisher Gentosha announced on October 23 ^[1][2][3]. The funeral was a private family service, and Gentosha asked people not to send condolence visits or gifts, in line with the family's wishes ^[2]. No cause of death has been given.

A debut that sold like a hit single

Murakami was born in 1952 in Sasebo, in Nagasaki prefecture, the son of two teachers ^[1][4]. He was still a student when he published his first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, in 1976 ^[1][2].

The book follows a group of disillusioned young people living amid drugs and sex ^[1]. It won the Gunzo prize for new writers and the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan's most prestigious literary awards ^[1][2]. Deadline reported that it sold more than 3.5 million copies across hardcover and paperback editions ^[2].

Those numbers matter as much as the prizes. A debut about drugged, drifting youth did not slip past the literary establishment. It was bought, in the millions, by the very public it described. The respectable prizes and the mass audience arrived together, and that tells you something about what the book was. Provocation can win a week of headlines. It does not usually win the Akutagawa Prize and 3.5 million readers.

My view is that the book was received so widely because it was not a dispatch from some distant underworld. The young people in it were not a warning about other people's children. They were a portrait of a generation, painted by a man who was still part of it.

The furniture of the age

What Murakami did next is the part I admire most. He never settled into one subject. Across more than 40 novels and story collections, the setting kept changing while the method stayed the same ^[1].

In Coin Locker Babies, the children are abandoned in baggage lockers, and the novel follows how they survive ^[1][3]. It won the Noma Literary New Face prize ^[1][3]. A baggage locker is among the most ordinary pieces of urban machinery there is. You feed it coins, you walk away, you come back for your suitcase. Murakami took that bland convenience and made it the place where a life begins. He did not invent a gothic castle for his horror. He used what was already bolted to the station wall.

In the Miso Soup, published in 1997, sends a tourist plunging into Tokyo's red-light district ^[2][3]. It won the Yomiuri Literary Prize ^[2]. Here the visitor's eyes are the reader's eyes, and the district is a real place of the kind every large city keeps. The book does not ask us to gasp at an exotic world. It asks what we notice, and what we choose not to notice, once we are standing in it.

The usual way to describe a writer like this is as a provocateur, someone who piles sex, violence and drugs onto the page to see who flinches. His own publisher reached for that language. Gentosha said he spent his career releasing "shocking works meant for a younger audience" ^[3]. That is a fair description of how the books were sold. It is a poor description of how they worked.

Shock, as a technique, depends on distance. The reader is startled because the material arrives from outside, from a place the reader does not live. Murakami's books close that distance.

Sex, loneliness, violence and the urge to be rid of one's own life sit in his pages the way chairs and tables sit in a house. They are simply there, and everyone walks around them.

The disturbing part was never the content. It was the absence of a door between the reader and the room.

The audition

Nowhere is that clearer than in Audition. Its premise is almost domestic. A widower, wanting a new girlfriend, stages fake film auditions to find one ^[1][3].

Notice who starts the trouble. The horror does not break in from the street. It begins with a lonely man's scheme, a small deception he has talked himself into. Anyone who has ever bent the truth a little to get what they want is already standing near the front door of that story. The monster, if there is one, is a thing the protagonist carries into the room himself.

Takashi Miike adapted the novel into a 1999 feature film, and it became the best-known screen version of Murakami's work ^[1][3]. It is the title most readers outside Japan will know first, and it earned its place as a landmark of modern horror. I would only add that its reputation as a horror film slightly undersells the book it came from. The fear in it is not the fear of the unknown. It is the fear that you know exactly how someone got there.

Murakami also worked in cinema himself. He was a screenwriter and director, and his films include Tokyo Decadence and Because of You, along with film adaptations of some of his own works ^[3][4]. That is not a surprising second career for a writer whose books are built from images you can see. Adam Freudenheim of Pushkin Press, Murakami's English-language publisher, called his novels "strange, original and cinematic" ^[1]. He said it had been a "huge privilege" to bring them to English-speaking readers ^[1].

What we have not read

Here is the limit that anyone writing in English has to admit. Most of Murakami's books have not been translated into English ^[1]. The list that English readers know, Coin Locker Babies, In the Miso Soup, Audition, Piercing and Popular Hits of the Showa Era, is a short shelf pulled from a long career ^[1].

So an English-language appreciation is, by necessity, an appreciation of a part.

It is worth keeping that in view for another reason. The writer who is remembered abroad is often the writer who translates easily, and the easiest thing to carry across a border is the shocking premise. An abandoned child, a red-light district and a staged courtship all fit on a book jacket.

What is harder to carry is the long, strange middle of a career, the books that do not have a one-line hook. We do not know what those say about him, and I would rather say so than pretend to a full portrait.

One small matter for tidiness. Ryu Murakami was not related to Haruki Murakami ^[1]. The two are often confused, and they are very different writers. If Haruki's fiction often opens a door to a parallel world, Ryu's never bothered with the door. Everything was already in the house.

The front runner

Gentosha, in its announcement, said Murakami had raced through life "as the front runner of an era" ^[3]. It is a publisher's phrase, and a generous one, but I think it holds. He published his first book while still a student and won the country's biggest prizes with it. He then spent the following decades refusing to let his readers sit comfortably.

He was the boy on the roof who paid for it with three months indoors, and who seems to have decided, when he got out, to write about what is on the other side of the glass. The monsters in his books do not creep in from the dark. They walk around in daylight, in train stations and tourist districts and the quiet plans of lonely men. Readers who open one of his books are not being asked to look at someone else's life. They are being asked to look at their own, with the lights on.

Whether more of his work reaches English is now the question to watch. No publisher has announced new translations. If Pushkin Press or another house decides the moment has come, the rest of the shelf may finally be readable.