Piercing

Piercing

by Ryu Murakami

Bloomsbury, HK$128

Like his namesake Haruki, Japanese novelist Ryu Murakami writes books so hip people don't read his work so much as wear it. This is especially true in the west, where his last novel (In the Miso Soup) was the epitome of designer-label publishing. The style-conscious will be glad to hear Piercing certainly looks the part: the cover fuses fuzzy neon images, a naked manga-esque heroine and a wacky font. But is it any good? The simple answer is not especially. First published in Japan in 1994, Piercing feels like a cash-in and is showing its age: a derivative tale of a sexually sadistic advertising executive, it should really be sub-titled Japanese Psycho. A more complicated response would be 'sort of', if you like your fiction brash, violent, perverse, superficial, cold and shocking after a calculated fashion. The opening scene features our 'hero' debating whether to kill his sleeping baby with an ice pick. This reference to Basic Instinct is the first of many to modern moviedom: Psycho, David Lynch, Don't Look Now. Perhaps this is my own old-fashioned problem. Even in translation, Murakami feels like a writer raised in the cinema, not the library: I imagine he has seen American Psycho more often than he has read it. Which is fine as far as it goes, except Piercing doesn't go very deep.