coin lokcker babies

I think I found this by accident at Kinokuniya while looking for the newest translation of Haruki Murakami. Ryu is a very different writer. This is not a book about a lonely man with an earlobe fetish having a hallucinatory midlife crisis.

Ryu Murakami, on the surface, makes Haruki look tame. I know of people who were haunted by images from this book for years, but to me it was Haruki’s novels that would always end up in my sleeping dreams. Probably ‘cuz I knew people like Ryu’s characters. Coin Locker Babies is about two unrelated abandoned baby boys. They grew up together inside Ryu’s edgy version of Japan.
Like all of Ryu’s writing there is drugs, sex, experimentation, violence, and decay. But these are his paints I suppose. What he does with these elements is what makes the book art.