Ryū Murakami

We'll move on to the decline and rebirth of Kaidan and uncanny fiction between the Meiji Restoration and the Pacific War before we discuss Japanese horror fiction of the last 70 or so years.

Then we'll wrap up our conversation today with Ryu Murakami, especially his novel In the Miso Soup.

A quick content note for this episode, the content isn't actually that horrifying until the end of our episode when we do turn to Ryu Murakami and In the Miso Soup.

That section of the episode will include some discussion of the sex industry and misogyny, as well as fictional graphic, very graphic, violence and sexual assault.

We'll be discussing that these themes appear in the book, but not the gruesome details.

The five stories are named for body parts, buttocks, blood, face, hair, and chin.

You can read Face for free via Words Without Borders if you want a sample of Japanese body horror.

Authors Kanai Minato, Kaori Fujino, and Ryu Murakami all use body horror to frighten and or disgust.

What's up weebs! Welcome back to Anime Lane, the podcast where we take you down the yellow brick road of anime and have a look at everything it has to offer.

On today's episode we're trying out for the role of a lifetime in Audition, directed by Takashi Miike, written by Daisuke Tengan, music by Koji Endo, based on the novel of the same name by Ryu Murakami.

It released in Japanese theaters March 3rd, 2000.

It is licensed by Arrow Films and is available on Blu-ray and UHD.

I know it's based on a novel, which I have not read.

Um, Ryu Murakami is the author.

Um, but the way that the movie introduces its world, you know, shooting, shooting the, the, you know, the lead character from behind for most of it, emphasizing the loneliness, you know, his, all the commentary early on about like Japan being finished and every Japanese man is lonely or every Japanese person is lonely and, and, and framing everything with empty space and, you know, negative space and all that, just like really just like looking at that as an older person who, you know, in, in, in not to, be too you know whatever about it but like in my recent history has really struggled with partnerships and romantically and and i've had to really kind of reset my expectations and lots of things you know going through a lot of stuff in the last couple years um really struck me as this just like really beautiful portrait of like loneliness and what it does and And his relationship with his son and, you know, somebody who has an adolescent son now and is really, you know, leaning on that relationship, you know, as I've gotten older.

There was so there was just so much in this film that I just found not even scary, but just just like so devastatingly beautiful.

They're enjoyable, but I don't...

I get where, when we had Obergon on, he was talking about... kind of the downfall of Haruki Murakami and why you should read Ryu Murakami instead Ryu Murakami writes for the most part on the coin locker baby short books that hit you really hard

yeah

pretty fast like there you'll get a good bit of build up and then all of a sudden you're just like oh oh oh oh

and then

like getting stabbed and then after that you're done

I was going to say, I do feel like, because also this year I've read a handful of the shorter Ryu Murakami books, and I feel like that also might have also affected my...

Yeah.