Piercing

About

Every night, Kawashima Masayuki stands over his baby daughter's crib with an ice pick in his hand. The urge to use it terrifies him. To purge the compulsion, he devises a plan: find a stranger — a sex worker — and redirect the violence onto someone who won't be missed. The plan is meticulous. Its execution is not. Ryu Murakami's short, savage novel watches two damaged people collide in a Tokyo hotel room, each carrying their own private pathology, each underestimating the other. The result is a horror story about control — who has it, who loses it, and what happens when two people's darkest impulses meet head-on. A novel that reads like a scalpel feels: precise, cold, and impossible to look away from.