Piercing – A Gripping Portrait of Bone-Deep Psychological Wound

“….That's when he hit her, when he saw how scared she was. He couldn't bear it that she was frightened and asking for help. Asking for help is wrong. Because there isn't any such thing as help in this world.”

Ryu Murakami, often referred to as the ‘other Murakami’, is the author of terse, unembellished, and radical novels that forthrightly takes us on a guided tour into Tokyo’s seedy underbelly, filled to the brim with kinky sex, drugs, sadomasochism, and other decadent tendencies. His characters are psychologically troubled and carry the trauma of childhood abuse. In fact, by making us envision his provocative, shocking visions, the author laceratingly explores the underlying depravity of resolutely narcissistic and materialistic metropolitan existence. Ryu Murakami gained international popularity after the release of Takeshi Miike’s Audition (based on the author’s 1997 novel), although he had been making waves in modern Japanese literature ever since his debut novel Almost Transparent Blue in 1976 (which won the prestigious Akutagwa Prize). However, Miike’s skillful adaptation provided us a bewitching glimpse into the novelists’ unfiltered and deeply troubled world (‘Audition’ is clearly one of the best Japanese psychological horror feature although it’s far different from typical J-horrors like Ringu, Ju-On, etc).

From mid-2000s, Ryu Murakami’s novels have been translated into English (mostly by Ralph McCarthy). Piercing was published in Japan in 1994 and translated to English in 2007. It was considered to be the first of Murakami’s trilogy of novels (followed by In the Miso Soup and Audition) to share the themes of child abuse, disillusion, cycle of violence, and profound alienation. Kawashima Masayuki is one of the two central characters in Piercing. When the story begins Kawashima, the family man, is at the darkened bedroom and staring at his sleeping infant daughter, not out of love but with anxiety as he self-assures himself that he won’t stab the baby with the ice-pick, which he has just retrieved from his pocket. The insomniac Kawashima has been performing this bizarre ritual for some days, while his cooking-expert wife is sound asleep.

Kawashima occupies a good salaried position of graphic designer and is happily married to Yoko. But he finds himself awake at night, standing near his 4-month daughter Rie’s crib, holding a penlight on one hand and ice-pick on the other, and thinking, “I would never stab that baby with an ice-pick, would I?” The guy is deeply rattled by the urge to commit a horrific act of violence. Hence in order to deflect the deep-seated fear of stabbing at a vulnerable baby with a common kitchen-tool, Kawashima looks for a possible ‘cure’: to relish the pleasure of killing somebody else using an ice-pick. Moreover, Kawashima is worried about his compulsion for violence because he was involved with a gruesome incident when he was 17. He has stabbed a stripper 19 years his senior, with whom he lived for two years. Although the stripper never pressed any charges against him, the memory of his unsavory action still haunts Kawashima.

 

Of course, Kawashima’s urge to inflict pain and find solace through violence is due to the persistent cruelty he faced during his childhood and teenage years. His volatile alter-ego is the result of beatings served by his mother and the time he spent at the ‘home for at-risk children’. Once Kawashima decides on the particular course of action (to stab someone else), he comes up with a perfect murder plan. He considers that a prostitute would be the right victim. Nevertheless, when Sanada Chiaki, an almost doll-like S&M-girl-for-hire, meets Kawashima the meticulously detailed murder plan begins to evaporate. Chiaki is a victim of child sexual abuse, afflicted by nagging voices and suicidal tendencies.  What follows is an unusual interior journey.

Christopher Abbott & Mia Wasikowska play the novel's central characters in the American movie adaptation (by Nicolas Pesce)

Unlike Murakami’s other novels, Tokyo nightlife doesn’t play a predominant role in Piercing. That may be because the schizophrenic characters’ angst and loneliness weren’t the direct result of constrained urban space. But as usual the author gradually draws us into his claustrophobic, stomach-churning world with agile, razor-sharp prose. Murakami relentlessly examines the residual damage from childhood traumas in a very viscerally disturbing manner. However, he often playfully turns our attention from the dismal reality with comedy of mix-ups and misinterpretations. The frenetic pace and constant intrigue allows Murakami to keep on building a pressure which also kind of distracts our focus from certain thin psychologization of childhood abuse. The ending, although is muted, remains compelling and gets beneath the skin. Altogether, Piercing is a short and tense psychological thriller which sears its way into the psyche of two damaged souls.   

 

Last Days – A Mercurial and Mesmerizing Metaphysical Mystery

“Says here”, he said, “missing a hand. I’d say that’s an understatement, wouldn’t you, Kline? How’d you lose your hand?”

I let someone cut it off,” said Kline.

“Now why would a man go and do a thing like that?”

That’s one of the many unanswerable questions strewn throughout Brian Evenson’s madcap literary horror Last Days (published in 2009), whose simple and straightforward prose is infused with apocalyptic tension and grotesque humor. Last Days follows former undercover cop Kline as he wades through ocean of uncertainty that begins with his hand getting chopped off by a ‘gentleman with a cleaver’. Kline self-cauterizes the wound and then shoots the ‘gentleman’ between his eyes. While Kline is caught under depression, thinking about retirement and the missing limb, a couple of low-level cultists start badgering Kline in order to recruit him for a job. In fact, Kline is chosen by the cult because of him losing an appendage and the audacious thing he did immediately after. After weeks of repeated phone calls, the cultists forcibly take Kline out of his apartment to meet the limbless top-tier saints of ‘The Brotherhood of Mutilation’.

Last Days draws a lot from hard-boiled detective genre, proving to be a twisted descendant of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. At the same time, Evenson’s minimalist and precise writing style elegantly disperses a tone of suggestive horror, pushing his readers to be deeply entrenched within his elusive reality. This damn funny as well as terrifying spiritual journey of a condemned man is my first Evenson novel, which I would definitely say redefines the horizons of horror literature. Brian Evenson was a devoted follower of Mormonism, who taught literature at the Mormon church-owned Brigham Young University till his publication of Altmann’s Tongue: Stories and a Novella (in 1994). Given the choice between writing and religion, Evenson chose the former, and ever since has discharged his mesmerizingly symbolic dark fiction to wreak havoc on the senseless self-sacrifice and blind obedience that bookends organized religion.

Novelist Peter Straub in his introduction of Last Days (better read after finishing the novel) describes it as a ‘novel made of two novellas joined at the hip, where they share a common seam’. The first part ‘The Brotherhood of Mutilation’ was originally published in 2003. The 2^nd part ‘Last Days’ is an extension of the 2003 novella, taking up the extremities and weirdness of the 1^st part to whole new levels. Once inside the cult’s campus Kline encounters its absurdly horrific dogma: amputations as the path to reach God (not just meta-physical shedding). The supreme leader of the brotherhood is just reduced to a torso, whose eyes are gouged, ears slashed off, and tongue partly severed. Kline is kidnapped to the place to investigate the murder of this alleged saint. But the limbless guy may not actually be dead and Kline might be recruited for some other sinister purpose by the hierarchy of multiple amputees.   

Brian Evenson

Last Days was addictive enough for me to read in a single sitting. But it is also unflichingly dark (bucket loads of blood and mutilations) and frustratingly obscure at times, which wouldn’t suit for readers expecting a more conventional mystery/horror narrative. The genre make-up (PI in search of answers) serves as a good hook to draw in the reader. But very soon, Evenson trades suspense and formal plot for parade of compelling allegorical notions, associated with religious abuse and apostasy. The author writes with a taut, impassioned voice (he calls it, ‘writing with an ethical blankness’). He doesn’t detail the atmosphere or inner conflict with flowery prose. This brings in a sense of narrow perspective (a suffocating reality), which diffuses great intensity to the proceedings.  What starts as a detective novel teeters on brink of uncertainties as our anti-hero keeps contemplating the loathsome things in the world and within him. Moreover, the foremost conflict in Last Days is the one that happens between his ever-changing consciousness and his perception of collapsing reality. And for all its visceral and repetitive violent actions, Evenson eventually constructs quite a few ‘big’ questions. Altogether, Last Days is a profoundly polemical and multilayered work on the unspeakable uncertainties in human life. 

 

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales – Captures the Agony and Desolation of Human Experience

“Why was everyone dying? They had all been so alive just yesterday.”

I am fascinated by writers who can conjure profound emotions and themes in their stories through deceptively simple prose. Yoko Ogawa is one such writer I stumbled upon in my literary wanderings to savor rich, wide variety of tales from Japanese literature. The way the author slowly immerses us into her world of gloom, obsession, and isolation reminded me of Haurki Murakami and Han Kang’s works. Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales was published in Ogawa’s native country in 1998, and translated to English in 2013 (by Stephen Snyder). The book consists of eleven loosely interlinked stories that subtly explores the murkiest, complex, and darkest parts of human relations. Revenge is neither traditional horror literature nor explicitly details an account of violent retribution. I don’t know what the actual Japanese title of the book insinuates ('Kamoku na shigai, Midara na tomurai'), but these tales are all distinct portrayal of shared reality and cyclical moods or emotions that make up the whole spectrum of human experience.  

Though it doesn’t belong to horror genre, Revenge immaculately builds a sense of dread which comes from precisely observing the ennui, loneliness, and misplaced desires of modern human life. Adding more to the ominous atmosphere is the anonymity of the settings. The supposed ‘Japanese-ness’ is largely absent in the eleven tales and consequently could be related to any place in the world; or perceive it to be unfolding in some darkest corners of our own reality. No names are mentioned throughout and although every story is told in first-person, at times it’s hard to understand whether the narrator is male or female (the odd-number tales are narrated by women and even numbers by men). What transfixed me more, while getting sucked into Ogawa’s orbit of fictional reality are the mesmerizing meta-layers Ogawa strews throughout these utterly bizarre short stories.

The first of the eleven tales titled ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’ opens in one beautiful Sunday afternoon, detailing the seemingly normal and cheery gathering of people in a quaint and attractive town square. The only odd one out in this perfect setting is the square’s clock tower, which when strikes five a little door opens beneath the clock and a parade of little animated figurines – a soldier, a skeleton, and a chicken – spin out. Gradually, the normalcy and beauty of warm sunlight and laughing children are smoothly replaced with the dark and macabre. This is how Ogawa starts almost all her tales: from picturesque to ghastly. In the first tale, a woman reaches a bakery to buy strawberry short cakes. The cake is for her son and it’s his birthday, but she reveals to an unknown woman that her son is dead for 12 years and forever six years old. The details related to the boy’s death gets more bleak (a traditional summary of the stories would only spoil the reading experience and so I’d like to limit myself).  

Yoko Ogawa

Although the interlinked stories are not so far removed from reality, the weird quotient gets consistently stronger. In “Old Mrs. J”, an old landlady grows carrots in her garden in the shape of human hands. In “Sewing for the Heart”, a bag designer is obsessed about making the perfect bag for a woman’s heart that remains outside her chest. In “Welcome to the Museum of Torture”, an old museum curator collects torture devices that were put to ‘good’ use. Nevertheless, what binds all the characters is the unshakable sense of displacement and isolation the characters feel from their immediate surroundings. The narrators are outsiders, trapped in their constantly destabilizing reality, and often take drastic steps to free themselves. Ogawa brilliantly links each stories through little details (the garden of kiwis, bakery shop, and museum making multiple appearances; food and numbers also plays a pivotal role in the inter-connection). Tracking the web of intersecting points constantly kept me on the edge and added more to the captivating reading experience.

“The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy current running under her words, and I found myself wanting o plunge into it again and again”, a man comments on a tale written by an obscure woman author (in ‘Tomatoes and the Full Moon’). Those words convey the inherent meta-nature of the book, as if the writer is remarking about her own writing style. Moreover, there are instances we aren’t sure on whether we are reading a clear-cut fictional creation of Ogawa or the meta-fictional product supposedly created by one of Ogawa’s character. By employing meta-layers, I felt Ogawa is playfully questioning the parameters of what we considers as ‘real’ in fiction and further addressing the ‘truth’, originating from fictional realm. What the author persistently zeroes-in on -- through her uncomplicated prose and simple settings -- is the every-day horror that occupies our reality, from failing relationships to death and emptiness. And of course, the horrors displayed in plain sight looks more terrifying than haunted houses or monsters living deep in the woods.

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales is an inventive and unsettling collection of thinly linked short stories that pries into spectrum of dark human emotions with unparalleled nuance and power. As an avid reader of dark, portentous tales, I firmly recommend this one.