From his description of the prostitute whose rather depressing ‘dream’ is to visit Niketown in New York and the joyless dancer whose translucent skin and thin body are cruelly exposed under the brash stage lights, to the near-empty ‘matchmaking’ pub that tries desperately to look classy but is instead gaudy and cheap, full of clients and staff who ‘look as if something has eroded away inside of them,’ Kenji paints a bleak picture of Tokyo’s nightlife. Despite his line of work Kenji seems like a normal, decent guy who has no interest in what goes on inside the clubs he takes his clients to. This is an aspect of Tokyo that I (obviously) didn’t consider when I decided to visit, but the novel gives a fascinating insight into a darker side of the city: a hollow and nihilistic world that’s sustained by loneliness, boredom and exploitation. The novel is narrated by Kenji, a young guy who makes a living by giving tourists ‘sex tours’ of Tokyo’s nightlife, guiding them to the ‘relatively safe’ clubs, bars, cabarets, massage parlours and ‘lingerie pubs’ (self-explanatory). Let’s not think too much about what that says about me. In the Miso Soup has topped that by managing to be even more sickeningly gory – and yet I enjoyed it much more.

I remember squirming as I read a scene in (Haruki) Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in which a man gets skinned to death very slowly. I read it over a series of lunch breaks sitting in Russell Square, huddled over the book with a horrified expression, my suddenly very unappetizing couscous salad pushed to one side. To build up my excitement to an even more unbearable pitch, my lovely friend Lizzie gave me a novel by another Murakami (Ryu Murakami) for my birthday: In the Miso Soup. I like to get a sense of a place I’m going to beforehand by reading its literature, but my only experience of Japanese literature until recently had been Haruki Murakami – and as you may know from older posts, I don’t really get the fuss, so my fascination with Japanese history and culture is really quite inexplicable (I do love udon noodles, but I’m not sure that explains it either). I’m going to Japan in October, and I’m already unbearably excited about it.

In the Miso Soup by Ryū Murakami