Ryu Murakami

Ryū Murakami is a Japanese novelist and filmmaker whose fiction occupies a deliberately discomforting corner of contemporary Japanese literature — raw, violent, and saturated with the particular anxieties of Japan's consumer society and its cultural discontents. He should not be confused with Haruki Murakami, though the two men have been asked to address the comparison for their entire careers.

His debut Almost Transparent Blue (1976) — a drug-and-sex-saturated portrait of young people living near a US military base — won the Akutagawa Prize and remains his most celebrated early work. Subsequent novels — Coin Locker Babies, 69, In the Miso Soup (a serial-killer thriller set in the tourist underbelly of Kabukicho), Piercing — have maintained his status as one of Japanese literature's most consistently provocative presences. He is also a film director of note.