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Popular Hits of the Showa Era A Novel Ryu Murakami Ralph McCarthy 9780393338423 Books

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Popular Hits of the Showa Era A Novel Ryu Murakami Ralph McCarthy 9780393338423 Books

Ryu Murikami has something of a cult following. Having read Popular Hits of the Showa Era, I am worried about the nature of this cult. The title is a wonderful joke and the premise has promise. The execution is too many executions. Just how bloody can droll be before the comedy is drained out dark comedy.

The fall back case for too many books like this is that it is a commentary on these terrible times, or a satire of the Russia/US Arms race. Popular Hits is not focused enough or logical enough to be much more than a too dark dystopia made to serve the overweening negativity of the dedicate punk goth rocker. Here the expression is made to evoke a now passé trend among some then older teens that pretended that everything and everyone is corrupt and terrible.

The title is taken, first from the Japanese tradition of naming an era for each new Emperor. The Showa Era was the life time of WW II Emperor Hirohito who died, ending the period in 1989. Greatest hits is a play on the expression used for rock music and the shorter one for gangster hits, i. e. murder.

The premise is that a group of supremely useless young Japanese males fall into one another’s company having in common except an interest in Karaoke and being stunned to immobility on those occasions when an unknown female undresses in her apartment window. For most of the book they will be described in terms rarely associated with functional humans.

One of their number indulges a whim by murdering a randomly selected middle age-Japanese woman. In the langue of Japan she is an obasan, or auntie. As it happens she was a member of a group of obsans who have in common being single and the same first name.

What follows in an increasing grotesque campaign of revenge and counter revenge. It may be possible to force some kind of commentary on what is another wise well written novella. This attempt is merely the results of a rational mind seeking to rationalize ugliness.


Tags : Popular Hits of the Showa Era: A Novel [Ryu Murakami, Ralph McCarthy] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <strong>From the author of <em>Audition</em>, a wickedly satirical and wildly funny tale of an intergenerational battle of the sexes.</strong> In his most irreverent novel yet,Ryu Murakami, Ralph McCarthy,Popular Hits of the Showa Era: A Novel,W. W. Norton & Company,0393338428,Divorced women - Japan,Divorced women;Japan;Fiction.,Humorous fiction,Revenge,Young men - Japan,Young men;Japan;Fiction.,Asia,Divorced women,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction-Coming of Age,Fiction-Literary,GENERAL,General Adult,Japan,Literary,Literature & literary studies,United States

Popular Hits of the Showa Era A Novel Ryu Murakami Ralph McCarthy 9780393338423 Books Reviews

Ryu Murakami, who bears no relation to the far better known Haruki Murakami, is a Japanese novelist and filmmaker who has written roughly 40 books about contemporary Japanese pop culture, only a few of which have been translated into English to date. Popular Hits of the Showa Era was written in 1994, but was not released in English translation until 2011.

This is an absurd comic novel and cultural satire set just after the completion of the Showa Era, which refers to the reign of Emperor Hirohito from 1926-1989. The first set of main characters are six young men, who are each nihilistic misfits that have been largely abandoned by their families and the larger society, but find common ground in each other and a shared interest in mindless violence and an elaborate and somewhat disturbing karaoke ritual. If you can visualize a group of Beavis & Butthead clones on steroids, you've got them pegged. They have little emotional connection to anyone, and they harbor an inexplicably deep hatred of Oba-sans, or aunties, the seemingly ubiquitous dowdy women past their prime period of attractiveness. As one of them says, "They always say that when human beings are extinct, the only living thing left will be the cockroach, but that's bullshit. It's the Oba-san."

One of the young men, filled with unfocused rage and vengeance, approaches an Oba-san who is unknown to him, and murders her in broad daylight. The woman is one of the members of the Midori Society, consisting of six thirtysomething women who all share the same last name and the same fate as unmarried, undesirable, purposeless and unfulfilled women who are equally as nihilistic and amoral as the young men. They learn who the killer is and take their revenge on him, which sets off a war between the two factions that is a cross between a bizarrely funny Looney Tunes cartoon and a mindlessly and increasingly violent B movie.

Despite all of this, I actually enjoyed this novel, which I found to be a biting critique of the nihilism, crassness and commercialization of contemporary Japanese pop culture, one in which its admirers seek instant gratification and bear no concern for the consequences of their behaviors or actions.
I'm a minor fan of Ryu Murakami and I've thoroughly enjoyed the few books of his that I've read (Piercing, In the Miso Soup, and Sixty-Nine) but this book is abhorrent. The characters are dull and the prose is often rambling and unfocused. It was an absolute chore to read, even at 192 pages, and there was almost no redeeming qualities about it.

I think, the problem lies with Ryu Murakami being able to only tackle a few characters at a time. There were far too many characters for him to keep track of this time around so they all come off as hollow and underdeveloped, and the attempts at development are flat and uninteresting. At one end, this is kind of the point because the characters aren't supposed to be strong individualists but at another end it just translates as a boring read and results in an unlikable cast.
Ryu Murikami has something of a cult following. Having read Popular Hits of the Showa Era, I am worried about the nature of this cult. The title is a wonderful joke and the premise has promise. The execution is too many executions. Just how bloody can droll be before the comedy is drained out dark comedy.

The fall back case for too many books like this is that it is a commentary on these terrible times, or a satire of the Russia/US Arms race. Popular Hits is not focused enough or logical enough to be much more than a too dark dystopia made to serve the overweening negativity of the dedicate punk goth rocker. Here the expression is made to evoke a now passé trend among some then older teens that pretended that everything and everyone is corrupt and terrible.

The title is taken, first from the Japanese tradition of naming an era for each new Emperor. The Showa Era was the life time of WW II Emperor Hirohito who died, ending the period in 1989. Greatest hits is a play on the expression used for rock music and the shorter one for gangster hits, i. e. murder.

The premise is that a group of supremely useless young Japanese males fall into one another’s company having in common except an interest in Karaoke and being stunned to immobility on those occasions when an unknown female undresses in her apartment window. For most of the book they will be described in terms rarely associated with functional humans.

One of their number indulges a whim by murdering a randomly selected middle age-Japanese woman. In the langue of Japan she is an obasan, or auntie. As it happens she was a member of a group of obsans who have in common being single and the same first name.

What follows in an increasing grotesque campaign of revenge and counter revenge. It may be possible to force some kind of commentary on what is another wise well written novella. This attempt is merely the results of a rational mind seeking to rationalize ugliness.