A scholar of drugs, speed, violence, gore, and Tokyo's teenage underground, writer/filmmaker Murakami (69, 1993, etc.) weighs in with a new novel that ably encapsulates the fin de siecle cultural detonation of Japanese youth. The "coin locker babies" (an apt metaphor for kids unmoored from tradition) are Kiku and Hashi, left in train-station lockers by their mothers shortly after birth, who grow up to become templates for a society losing its religion. Adopted and raised on a remote island in the shadow of a ghost town, Kiku embraces his athleticism and learns to polevault while Hashi, the punier of the two, cultivates an interest in music that will eventually lead to runaway success as a pop star. Separated for a while, both boys gravitate to Tokyo, where they are reunited in Toxitown, a haven for freaks and hustlers. The bisexual Hashi has met a recording tycoon who will transform him from sniveling prostitute into captivating media god; Kiku, by contrast, shacks up in a condo with a model named Anemone and her pet crocodile. When a scheme to reunite Hashi with his mother goes awry, resulting in the televised shotgun death of a woman who is really Kiku's mother, Kiku is charged with murder and sent to a juvenile detention facility, where he meets a gang of teen offenders and enlists them in his plot to exterminate the population of Tokyo with DATURA, a deadly experimental chemical agent. Meanwhile, Hashi, who has practically disowned his coin-locker brother, undertakes a wildly successful but psychologically debilitating tour in the company of his beleaguered wife and a band of dissolute gay hipsters. He and Kiku never reunite, but in the book's closing pages they reach an eerie, elliptical detente. Snyder's agile translation preserves much of the shock, beauty, and pathos in this apocalyptic minisaga of troubled times. (Kirkus Reviews)

"Its power grabbed me by the heart."

"... an amazing, imaginative adventure."

"Startlingly hip, frighteningly inventive."

"Deliciously grotesque."

A surreal coming-of-age tale that establishes Ryu Murakami as one of the most inventive young writers in the world today. Abandoned at birth in adjacent train station lockers, two troubled boys spend their youth in an orphanage and with foster parents on a semi-deserted island before finally setting off for the city to find and destroy the women who first rejected them. Both are drawn to an area of freaks and hustlers called Toxitown. One becomes a bisexual rock singer, star of this exotic demimonde, while the other, a pole vaulter, seeks his revenge in the company of his girlfriend, Anemone, a model who has converted her condominium into a tropical swamp for her pet crocodile. Together and apart, their journey from a hot metal box to a stunning, savage climax is a brutal funhouse ride through the eerie landscape of late-twentieth-century Japan.

This work, from one of Japan's most inventive young writers, traces the surreal adventures of two abandoned teenagers in the heart of Tokyo. Murakami's first novel, "Almost Transparent Blue", sold over one million copies on first publication.

AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL

The Market was a four-lane highway that ran through a tunnel in the area. The guards had apparently been bought off so that the tunnel could serve as a ready link between customers on the outside and the services provided inside. The system seemed to work, since the stalls that lined the road were doing a brisk business--with one difference: the commerce was almost completely silent. Not a voice could be heard as buyers and sellers, whatever the commodity, conducted their transactions in whispers, their lips pressed against each other's ears. The street stalls were fairly rudimentary, just a table and some chairs set up along the side of the road where the customers sat down and waited for the prostitute in attendance--in some cases a woman, in others a man--to quietly bring them a drink. The list of drinks was simple: watered-down beer or a kind of sweet wine in dark bottles. The freelance whores lining the street advertised with creative postures but rarely went out of their way to approach a passing customer. The men, it seemed, had been there from the beginning, but the number of women had increased suddenly when the underground highway had opened. Now they lined the tunnel, leaning against the walls, smoking with one hand and hiking up their skirts with the other. One woman had got hers up further than the rest, and the silver ring embedded in the fleshy lips between her legs glittered in the ancient yellow fluorescent light. A black woman languidly sucked grapes from a bunch, skinning them deftly with her mouth and letting them roll on her tongue like green marbles. Her dress, split down the back to the top of her ass, barely covered the sour, velvet skin beneath. A young girl was dancing in the street in toeshoes tied with white ribbons. On her thigh was a tattoo of a hydrofoil, and around her neck she wore a snakeskin collar complete with leash. A pair of twins had been painted on her buttocks, one per cheek, and they seemed to be clutching the real, lighted candle protruding between them.

In addition to the women, the tunnel walls were lined with makeshift drugstores which dealt almost exclusively in tranquilizers, the non-addictive drug of choice for both the working girls and their customers. A tranquilizer called Neutro, in fact, could almost have been said to be the pillar on which the social system of The Market was built. It was Neutro that one had to thank for the placid whispers, the smooth conduct of commerce minus the usual irritations and problems. Under a Neutro-induced haze, activity along the subterranean road was reduced to mutters, sighs, and muffled coughs, the sound effects of a concert hall between the movements of a symphony. The Market was a circus with the soundtrack left off, a silent parade, a muted ballet with only a light ringing in the ears gently lulling the spectator into the general torpor. Not silence exactly, but an odd, noiseless noise, like rustling silk, or soft footsteps on wet concrete--like a tongue sucking at a gap between two teeth, or skin on skin, or clear sake being poured into a glass. The Market was a masked ball with only the sound of the feathers fluttering on a thousand strange costumes. Those who saw it for the first time invariably said they thought they had died and gone on to some other life.

Ryu Murakami was born in 1952. The only son of schoolteacher parents, he grew up in the port city of Sasebo in southwestern Japan. After graduating from a local high school, where he played the drums in a band called Coelacanth, he went to an art college in Tokyo. It was while studying there that he entered his first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, in a competition for new writers. Published in 1976, the book won a major literary award and sold over a million copies. Since then, he has worked for a publishing house, presented a weekly music and interview radio program, and hosted a TV talk show. His literary output includes two collections of stories Run, Takahashi (1985) and Topaz (1988), and the novel Coin Locker Babies (1980), which made its debut in English early in 1995. His roman a clef 69 appeared in English in 1993. He has also directed four movies based on his writing, causing a sensation at an Italian film festival when Tokyo Decadence was shown there in!
1992. His latest film is set in the U.S. and Cuba.

Steven Snyder, the translator, is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Among his first-rate translations from Japanese are Kunio Tsuji's The Signore: Shogun of the Warring States, which won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize; Ryu Murakami's Coin Locker Babies; Kenzaburo Oe's A Healing Family; and the forthcoming Out by Natsuo Kirino.

2007-06-17 Depressingly Dire

I've read the reviews by people on amazon, because a detailed book review is hard to find online, and I cannot fathom how anyone can see this book as being good.

It is extremely depressing and miserable, but not in a way that you can relate and feel emotional about, but in a horribly boring way. Every page turn, you soon learn to expect something terrible will happen, even if there is no real reason for it to. The author disjointedly writes about his shallow characters, whose actions can be predicted effortlessly.

Needlessly depressing, the plot slugglishly moves from one horribly predictable event to the next, dragging you into a world of misery, leaving all emotions except boredom behind.

I would not recommend this book, and although I have heard better things about his other novels, I shall be looking elsewhere.