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...

Coin Locker Babies is a cult cyberpunk masterpiece and Ryu Murakami's most famous novel. Two babies are left in a Tokyo station coin locker and survive against the odds, but their lives are forever tainted by this inauspicious start. As they grow up, they join the ranks of Toxitown: a district of addicts, freaks and prostitutes. While one becomes a...

In a small, inconsequential city in Japan, all that matters to 17-year-old Kensuke Yazaki and his friends is girls, rock music and, to a much lesser extent, school. Told at high speed and with irresistible humour by Kensuke himself, this is the story of their 1969, as they engage in heated conversations about Marxism, Rimbaud, Godard, the Beatles and the...

It's a set-up like a video game: two rival gangs fight to death for the control of a Tokyo district. In one gang, six young losers committed only to drinking, voyeurism, and karaoke singing; in the other, six tough independent older women. From ambush to revenge, both groups are gradually decimated until the ultimate showdown. In Murakami's inimitably brutal and...

"Mr. Murakami’s novels are filled with entertaining psychopaths." —The New York Times In the Miso Soup by postmodern Renaissance man Ryu Murakami, master of the psychothriller and director of Tokyo Decadence, offers a hair-raising roller-coaster ride through the nefarious neon-lit world of Tokyo’s sex industry. It's just before New Year, and Frank, an American tourist, has hired Kenji to take...

From the Fatherland, with Love is set in an alternative, dystopian present in which the dollar has collapsed, and Japan's economy has fallen along with it. The North Korean government, sensing an opportunity, sends a fleet of 'rebels' in the first land invasion that Japan has ever faced. Japan can't cope with the surprise onslaught of 'Operation from the Fatherland,...