Book Review: Audition by Ryu Murakami
Dec. 19th, 2025 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juushikaTitle: Audition
Author: Ryu Murakami
Translator: Ralph McCarthy
Published: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010 (1997)
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 210
Total Page Count: 553,110
Text Number: 2073
Read Because: my mum is reading Katie Kitamura's Audition for a book club which led to some funny confusion when she mentioned as much on our last call, and now I think she's going to read Murakami's Audition too??, so I figured I should tag along just to mediate that experience for her if she thinks it's weird, which it is; ebook borrowed from Multnomah County Library
Review: A middle-aged Japanese man stages a search for a breakthrough actress as a pretense for interviewing prospective brides, and gets more than he bargained for. The thing about asking the question, does this mildly icky person deserve this oversized punishment, is that means inhabiting mildly icky in depth to first justify and then dismiss the inclination towards punishment. That makes for a lot of milquetoast Japanese misogyny and slow foreshadowing, capped by high-stakes and surreal revenge porn from the victim's PoV. Murakami is better when he's weirder, and when anxieties about Japanese society are framework rather than the central subject. But the constrained length, antagonist characterization, and the delightful dark humor of the revenge (which makes for pretty funny foreshadowing) has a salvaging effect, pulling this tauter and rendering it more readable.
Author: Ryu Murakami
Translator: Ralph McCarthy
Published: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010 (1997)
Rating: 2.5 of 5
Page Count: 210
Total Page Count: 553,110
Text Number: 2073
Read Because: my mum is reading Katie Kitamura's Audition for a book club which led to some funny confusion when she mentioned as much on our last call, and now I think she's going to read Murakami's Audition too??, so I figured I should tag along just to mediate that experience for her if she thinks it's weird, which it is; ebook borrowed from Multnomah County Library
Review: A middle-aged Japanese man stages a search for a breakthrough actress as a pretense for interviewing prospective brides, and gets more than he bargained for. The thing about asking the question, does this mildly icky person deserve this oversized punishment, is that means inhabiting mildly icky in depth to first justify and then dismiss the inclination towards punishment. That makes for a lot of milquetoast Japanese misogyny and slow foreshadowing, capped by high-stakes and surreal revenge porn from the victim's PoV. Murakami is better when he's weirder, and when anxieties about Japanese society are framework rather than the central subject. But the constrained length, antagonist characterization, and the delightful dark humor of the revenge (which makes for pretty funny foreshadowing) has a salvaging effect, pulling this tauter and rendering it more readable.
