Ryu Murakami, cult Japanese author, dies aged 74

The bestselling writer, known as Japan’s enfant terrible, explored the dark underbelly of Japanese society in more than 40 works of subversive fiction including Audition, later made into a landmark indie horror movie

Ryu Murakami, the cult Japanese author and film-maker whose subversive, blackly comic novels found millions of readers, has died aged 74. He died on 17 October at home, according to his Japanese publisher Gentosha.

Described as the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature, Murakami incorporated violence, explicit drug use and sex into stories that offered a sharp-eyed critique of Japanese and American culture.

“It has been a huge privilege to bring many of Ryu Murakami’s strange, original and cinematic novels to an English-speaking audience,” said Adam Freudenheim, publisher and managing director at Pushkin Press, which, along with Bloomsbury, publishes Murakami’s works in translation in the UK.

Murakami was the son of two teachers, born in Sasebo, Nagasaki prefecture, in 1952. During high school, he joined a rock band as a drummer, and after participating in a rooftop protest was placed under a three-month house arrest. He published his first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, in 1976. The book, written while he was still a student, is narrated by a character called Ryū, and depicts the hedonistic lifestyle of a group of disillusioned, nihilistic young people. It won the Gunzo prize for new writers along with the Akutagawa prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award.

Murakami was not related to his better-known namesake, Haruki. Ryu Murakami’s books are “edgier and angrier” wrote the journalist David Pilling in 2013. “If Haruki is the Beatles of Japanese literature, Ryu is its Rolling Stones”.

Murakami went on to write more than 40 novels and short story collections, including Coin Locker Babies, In the Miso Soup, Audition, Piercing and Popular Hits of the Showa Era. Most of his books have not yet been translated into English.

Many of his works have been adapted for screen, either by himself or other film-makers. The best-known is Audition, a 1999 feature film directed by Takashi Miike. The story follows a widower holding fake movie auditions in order to find a new girlfriend. Writing about the novel in the Guardian in 2009, Irvine Welsh described its prose as “elegiac and affecting, but it has the sharp, visceral feel of the butcher’s knife or surgeon’s scalpel”.

Murakami’s third novel, Coin Locker Babies, about children abandoned in storage lockers, won the Noma literary new face prize. The novel is “a surreal coming-of-age horror story that runs wildly through the heights of love and superstardom, and the lows of insanity and murder”, wrote Russell Thomas in the Guardian in 2020, selecting the novel as one of the best books set in Japan. “Murakami’s stories never shy away from shining a light on the darkest corners of society,” he added.

“All at Pushkin Press are saddened to hear of his death and extend our sympathies to his many readers around the world,” said Freudenheim.