Audition
About
Aoyama is a widower who has spent seven years alone with his son. When he finally decides to remarry, a filmmaker friend suggests an unconventional approach: hold fake auditions for a movie they'll never make, and use the casting calls to find a wife. Among the résumés, one applicant stops Aoyama cold — Yamasaki Asami, a former ballerina with a gentle manner and a past that doesn't quite add up. By the time he realizes something is profoundly wrong, he is already hers. Ryu Murakami's most famous novel starts as a midlife romance and ends somewhere no reader expects to go. The tonal shift — from loneliness to infatuation to genuine horror — is executed with the precision of a trap closing. Audition is a novel about the danger of projecting your fantasy onto another person — and what happens when that person has fantasies of her own.
