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(★)(Translated by Ralph McCarthy／ 英文版 イン･ザ･ミソスープ／ It is just before New Year´s.／ Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo´s sleazy nightlife on three successive evenings. But Frank´s behavior is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion : that his new client is in fact the serial killer currently terrorizing the city.／ It isn´t until the second night, however, in a scene that will shock you and make you laugh and make you hate yourself for laughing, that Kenji learns exactly how much he has to fear and how irrevocably his encounter with this great white whale of an American will change his life.／ Kenji´s intimate knowledge of Tokyo´s sex industry, his thoughtful observations and wisecracks about the emptiness and hypocrisy of contemporary Japan, and his insights into the shockingly widespread phenomena of ´compensated dating´ and ´selling it´ among Japanese schoolgirls, give us plenty to think about on every page. Kenji is our likable, if far from innocent, guide to the inferno of violence and evil into which he unwillingly descends --and from which only Jun, his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, can possibly save him ...／ ◆Renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami has played drums for a rock group, made movies (including ´Tokyo Decadence´), and hosted a TV talk show. While he was still a student, his first novel was awarded his country´s most coveted literary prize and sold over one million copies. This appeared in English as ´Almost Transparent Blue´, and has since been followed by the comic novel ´69´ and ´Coin Locker Babies´, which The Washington Post called ´a knockout ... a great big pulsating parable.´ Now, ´In the Miso Soup´ will give readers a further taste of the incredibly agile imagination that has won him a huge following in Japan. Ralph McCarthy is the translator of ´69´ by Ryu Murakami and two collections of stories by Osamu Dazai --´Self Portraits´ and ´Blue Bamboo´.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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