Critiques en avant-premièreRyü Murakami

These fifteen stories by Ryu Murakami center around an eclectic cast of not-so-average Tokyoites in the decades of the eighties, nineties, and noughties — call girls, film directors, murderers and mental cases, truck drivers, hostesses, waiters, drug dealers, single mothers, and broken-hearted lovers. They all come alive here, channeled through the imaginative genius of Ryu Murakami, to share tales rich in humor, pathos, humanity, and hope.

From the author of Audition, a wickedly satirical and wildly funny tale of an intergenerational battle of the sexes. In his most irreverent novel yet, Ryu Murakami creates a rivalry of epic proportions between six aimless youths and six tough-as-nails women who battle for control of a Tokyo neighborhood. At the outset, the young men seem louche but harmless, their activities limited to drinking, snacking, peering at a naked neighbor through a window, and performing karaoke. The six "aunties" are fiercely independent career women. When one of the boys executes a lethal ambush of one of the women, chaos ensues. The women band together to find the killer and exact revenge. In turn, the boys buckle down, study physics, and plot to take out their nemeses in a single blast. Who knew that a deadly "gang war" could be such fun? Murakami builds the conflict into a hilarious, spot-on satire of modern culture and the tensions between the sexes and generations.