| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9784770028969 | | Publisher: Kodansha International (JPN) | | Publish Date: 4/10/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 31012793 | | Item#: RNS3QR | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7.5H x 5.5L x 1T | | Pages: 400 |
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| | | | ""The woman pushed on the baby's stomach and sucked its penis into her mouth; it was thinner than the American menthols she smoked and a bit slimy, like raw fish. She was testing to see if the baby would cry, but the little arms and legs were still, so she peeled away the plastic wrapping over its face. She lined a cardboard box with towels, laid the baby inside, and taped the box shut. Then she tied it with string and wrote a made-up name and address on the side in big print.".." (from the first line) A surreal coming-of-age tale that establishes Ryu Murakami as one of the most inventive young writers in the world today.
Abandoned at birth in adjacent train station lockers, two troubled boys spend their youth in an orphanage and with foster parents on a semi-deserted island before finally setting off for the city to find and destroy the women who first rejected them. Both are drawn to an area of freaks and hustlers called Toxitown. One becomes a bisexual rock singer, star of this exotic demimonde, while the other, a pole vaulter, seeks his revenge in the company of his girlfriend, Anemone, a model who has converted her condominium into a tropical swamp for her pet crocodile.
Together and apart, their journey from a hot metal box to a stunning, savage climax is a brutal funhouse ride through the eerie landscape of late-twentieth-century Japan.
Annotation:
As two orphans grow up--one to become a pole vaulter, the other a rock star--their bizarre lives begin to spiral drastically out of control. Their strange circumstances, while alienating them from most people, bring them closer together as they hunt for the mothers they believe have abandoned them.
| Praise(unknown)
"Ryu Murakami displays the surreal exuberance of a writer with talent to burn...Coin Locker Babies is a very large, hilariously ornate whorehouse mirror in which you can see the whole modern world." - Gary Indiana(unknown)
"This novel gives a whole new meaning to the word 'excellence.' Its power immediately grabbed me by the heart." - Banana Yoshimoto San Francisco Review of Books
"...[A] brillliantly inspired coming-of-age tale set in [an] increasingly amorphous, dark underbelly of modern Japan....Coin Locker Babies establishes Murakami as a writer to watch....Murakami is a literary contortionist, effortlessly shifting between elements of cyber culture, absurdism, existentialism, and magical realism; all of this offset by lyrically soaring descriptions of nature and the senses. In this way, Murakami masters the transition from the roar of apocalyptic chaos to the tranquility of a quiet meditation. The effect is dazzling and surprisingly lucid." - Todd Jatras July/August 1995 |
| Author Bio| Ryu Murakami | | Murakami was born and raised in Sasebo City, a suburb of Nagasaki, Japan. In high school, he studied music and played drums in a rock band. In 1969, at the age of 17, Murakami came to be profoundly influenced by the student demonstrations and riots at Nippon University. Culminating in a firefight between the police and students armed with "molotov cocktails" at Yasuda Hall, these riots provided an exciting backdrop to his final year of high school. At the age of 23, while studying art at university, he wrote and submitted what was to become his first novel, "Almost Transparent Blue". Winning the prestigious Akutagawa Award, the novel created a huge stir, selling millions of copies in Japan, sparking debates about its "offensive" subject matter, and become one of the first books in Japan to gain widespread acceptance in its use of what is referred to as "katakana nouns"--which, in the most simplistic definition, are nouns based on non-Japanese words whose "Japanese-ified" spelling is essentially invented by the writer. Murakami parlayed his sudden fame and notoriety into a wide range of fields: as one of the leading fans and authorities in Japan on Carribean music, he has been a disc-jockey; he has hosted his own TV talk show; he has been a respected columnist for "Best Magazine"--some of his columns from which are collected in the books "Topaz" and "All Men Are Expendable". Based loosely on his own experiences in high school, his novel "69" was also an unqualified success in Japan. Since then, Murakami has maintained a high profile as a cultural guru, continuing to publish novels and stories, along with maintaining his own website--containing both excerpts of his published work, unpublished stories, and photography--and as a film director--including "Tokyo Decadence", a film that was highly controversial in the West because of its extreme sexual content, and just as controversial in Japan because of its political and cultural content. |
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