In The Miso Soup

About

Over three nights before New Year’s Eve, twenty-year-old Kenji guides an American tourist named Frank through the sex clubs and hostess bars of Kabukicho, Tokyo’s red-light district. Frank is overweight, strangely plastic-looking, and asks too many questions. Kenji suspects early on that Frank may be the serial killer the news has been reporting — and keeps showing up to work anyway, drawn by the money, the danger, and a complicity he can’t quite name. When the violence comes, it is sudden, graphic, and total. Ryu Murakami uses the horror-thriller framework to crack open something deeper: a portrait of millennial Tokyo as a place where loneliness has become so ordinary that a monster can walk through it undetected. The miso soup of the title is the last warm, human thing in the book. After that, nothing is warm.