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.