Piercing

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Kawashima Masayuki is a successful graphic designer living in Tokyo with his loving wife, Yoko, & their baby girl. Outwardly, their lives are a picture of happiness & contentment, but every night while his wife sleeps Kawashima creeds from him bed & watches over the baby’s crib with an ice pick in his hand & an almost visceral desire to use it.   

One night, as this struggle unfolds once more, Kawashima makes a decision to confront his demons & sets into motion an uncontrollable chain of events seeming to lead inexorably to murder. The follow-up to In the Miso Soup from a cult favorite writer, Piercing confirms Murakami as the master of the psycho thriller—terrifying, sickening, & utterly gripping.

In Piercing, Murakami, in his own unique style, explores themes of child abuse & what happens to the voiceless among us, weaving a disturbing, spare tale of two people who find each other & then are forced into hurting each other deeply because of the haunting specter of their own abuse as children.

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A renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami—a musician, filmmaker (Tokyo Decadence), TV personality, & award-winning author—has gained a cult following in the West. His first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, won Japan’s most coveted literary prize & sold over a million copies, & his most recent psychosexual thriller, In the Miso Soup, gave readers a further taste of his incredibly agile imagination.

Ralph McCarthy is the translator of 69 & In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami, & two collections of stories by Osamu Dazzai.