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Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud

Popular Hits of the Showa Era - Ryū Murakami, Ralph McCarthy The Book Report: Six dreadfully bored, dreadfully sociopathic young twentysomething men find each other, and for want of anything better to do, start hanging out. They drink, they eat, they talk at but not to each other, and no one bothers to listen because no one has anything to say that means any-damn-thing in the others' solipsistic brainiverses.Six dreadfully bored, dreadfully ugly and unloving, unloved thirtysomething women find each other, and for want of anything better to do, start hanging out. They drink, they eat, they talk at but not to each other, and no one bothers to listen because no one has anything to say that means any-damn-thing in the others' solipsistic brainiverses.One day, one of the men decides, after a horrible sleepless night, to kill one of the women. Thus begins a kind of grisly tontine scheme of murder and reprisal that ends in the death of an entire Tokyo suburb.My Review: Ick. I feel defiled. There is nothing believable about this book, thank goodness, because if there *was* I would be forced to sharpen my longest knife and go out randomly slitting the throats of passers-by.Ryu Murakami, it would seem, is the Dennis Cooper of the Japanese literary scene, exploring the revolting images that modern Japanese society casts in the funhouse mirror. He's won a boatload of prizes for doing this. All I can think is, Japanese society being so buttoned up and tightly controlled, this kind of transgressive hooliganism carries more of a shock-and-awe sensation than it does in our American laissez-faire emotional environment. All it does for me is make me feel like I've spent several hours with the most absurdly overacting players of overwritten parts in an overwrought melodrama that, while effectively satirizing the anomie and autarky of armed camps that constitute modern societies, loses a lot of its force and impact to sheer overexuberance.Thank goodness it's short. Fifty more pages and I'd have to mail-bomb the publisher's offices.