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the complete review - fiction

Tokyo Decadence

by
Murakami Ryu

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : solid, nicely varied collection

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "(I)t is indispensable to understanding why Ryu Murakami (...) has been so garlanded with honors in Japan, including the prestigious Akutagawa and Noma prizes. (...) Murakami tends to write in Raymond Carver-mode, with open-ended narratives that intersect with other stories through characters and themes. In each of his short story collections, he also focuses on a particular locale in Tokyo (.....) Resonating with some fascinating ideas on the nature of art itself, Murakami’s stories offer a fearless and iconoclastic insight into the subterranean obsessions and passions of Japan’s megalopolis." - Damian Flanagan, The Japan Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Tokyo Decadence offers a selection of stories from five collections published by Murakami between 1986 and 2003. (It should not be confused with the Murakami film of the same title (and, in Japanese, released as トパーズ ('Topaz' -- also the title of his 1988 collection, three stories from which are included here).) There are connections running through each of the collections (well, one assumes so -- there's only one sample from the final collection, so there's nothing to compare that to), beginning with the first, 'Run, Takahashi !', in which (real-life) Tokyo Carp baseball player Takahashi Yoshihiko figures in some form in each story, generally as some sort of point of reference. (In a brief note at the end of the book, translator McCarthy (heartbreakingly) mentions that he translated all eleven of the 'Run, Takahashi !'-stories in the late 1980s, "certain that someone would publish the collection in English. No one did, but I managed to receive an NEA grant for the work"; three of the stories are included in Tokyo Decadence.) These unifying threads from the various collections dangle , briefly, tantalizingly, section after section, but Tokyo Decadence as a whole has a choppier feel; on the other hand, it also shows considerably greater range than any one of these collections can.
       There is a lot of Tokyo in Tokyo Decadence -- the collections tend to be localized, too, centered on a particular area or aspect of the city -- and there's more decadence. The decadence ranges from straightforward sex-for-hire excess to autobiographically-tinged stories of the author's early days in Tokyo involving a good deal of drugs and some very loose (and partially unhinged) women, to the twenty-year-old loser ("How did she know ? I was a pervert. I was what they call a masochist"), who takes action when his obsessive stalking is discovered and goes on a brief killing spree. There's actually surprising restraint to most of this: the drug taking tends to be very casual, mentioned incidentally but hardly elaborated much on, and even the most brutal acts are quickly dealt with; the triple-homicide of 'Each Time I Read your Confession' barely covers half a paragraph (though Murakami can still make a lasting impression, that description horribly-memorably closing: "It sounded like stepping in mud") -- and the focus of the story is on the murder he didn't commit.
       There's an interesting range of narrators: in several cases clearly autobiographical -- the stories from 'Ryu's Cinematheque' -- while he also repeatedly assumes a female's voice. Protagonists are often succinctly introduced and placed, often in the stories' opening lines: "I am a novelist. I'm thirty-five years old"; "I was eighteen"; "I was twenty-three or so".
       A recurring theme of sorts is self-discovery, the stories (including the autobiographical ones) essentially ones of characters explaining how they've reached this point -- become the person they are -- the stories themselves then essentially ones of that realization of who they really are (or always have been). It's most obvious in 'It All Started Just About a Year and a Half Ago', the narrator describing his (un)surprising metamorphosis, flowering when his wife left him and the trucking company he worked for went bust, leaving him unemployed.
       The revealing autobiographical pieces of 'Ryu's Cinematheque' are interesting background, also in the context of Murakami's other fiction. Among the most powerful parts of the whole collection comes in 'La Dolce Vita', the young narrator finding a friend, Wada, who opens a new world of artistic vision to him, the two of them at a crossroads of what path to take, the narrator, inspired and overcome with emotion (and convinced) after having seen the film La Dolce Vita leaving a note for Wada:

Fellini's amazing. You should make films. Forget about the ad agency. Let's make another movie together.

- M.A.Orthofer, 14 March 2016

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Links:

• Kurodahan Press publicity page
• Stories from the collection:
  • The Last Picture Show
  • Whenever I Sit at a Bar Drinking Like This

• Contemporary Japanese Literature
• Experiments in Manga
• The Japan Times
• Tony's Reading List

• Audition
• From the Fatherland, with Love
• In the Miso Soup
• Piercing
• Popular Hits of the Showa Era
• 69

• See Index of Japanese literature

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About the Author:

       Murakami Ryu (村上 龍) is a leading Japanese author. He was born in 1952.

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