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Review: Ryu Murakami - Piercing (1994, Translated in 2007 by Ralph McCarthy)
This was a short story by Ryu Murakami. It was dark and violent, so only read this if you can handle it. I think it was interesting and thrilling, but I'll be very picky and careful about choosing Ryu Murakami's books in the future as this one had the potential to become scary nightmare fuel for me >.<
Spoilers.
Story
This story was about the meeting of two people. Kawashima Masayuki was a married man whose wife just had a baby. He was battling thoughts of wanting to stab the baby, which he knew was not the right thing to do, so he instead wanted to relieve his urge of needing to stab someone by planning to stab (and kill) a prostitute instead. He experienced trauma in the past and he clearly dealt with mental and emotional issues at the time of this novel.
Sanada Chiaki was a prostitute working for an S&M club who was called by Kawashima. He intended for her to be his victim. Chiaki was also a victim of abuse in the past, and though she didn't seem super unstable, I also wouldn't call her emotionally healthy. She was impulsive but also naive.
Kawashima called for Chiaki to come to his hotel room, where he planned to tie her down and murder her. However, things took a turn when Chiaki had a mental episode, and started stabbing herself. Kawashima managed to calm her down, through his past experience of being around other mentally unstable people.
From then on, the mindsets of these two characters changed dramatically. Kawashima's notes on murder were laid out, and so he believed that Chiaki had seen his notes and realized that he was going to kill her. So he saw her as someone who needed to be gotten rid of to protect himself. On the other hand, Chiaki saw Kawashima as a hero because he had calmed her down and shown her sympathy in a way that she'd never experienced. Chiaki thought that Kawashima was caring for her, when instead Kawashima was just trying to cover his ass.
Kawashima took Chiaki to the hospital to get her wound treated, and afterward they went to Chiaki's house. Chiaki tried to seduce Kawashima, as she saw Kawashima as her prince. In reality, Kawashima was simultaneously not attracted to Chiaki sexually, and he was trying to figure out a way to get rid of her. I suppose he agreed to go to her house just so he wouldn't lose track of her.
When Kawashima wasn't reacting to Chiaki's advances, she felt kind of rejected, and so she drugged Kawashima's food with halcion. As the drugs hit his system, he grew very violent with Chiaki. He attempted to tie her up and then cut her achilles' tendon (as he'd intended to back at the hotel), but he'd fainted from the drugs before he was able to.
As he was knocked out, Chiaki reflected on how she felt about the happenings, that she wasn't actually afraid when Kawashima threatened to cut her achilles' tendon. And as Kawashima woke up, Chiaki was piercing her other nipple.
It's a strange ending, but I suppose that hardly any ending would seem "normal" for such a wild story. Anything that happened would feel unpredictable to me.
In terms of what I think would happen after the end of the book, I think nothing would happen, for now. I think Kawashima would go back to his wife and child not having done what he'd set out to do, but at least he wasn't a murderer (yet). But I fear that the urge to stab would hit Kawashima again and he would try this all over again, or worse, he might stab his own family, as he had feared. As for Chiaki, I think she would keep going about her job as a call girl for am S&M club. But she does live a slightly dangerous life, so she might meet someone as frightening and dangerous as Kawashima in the future.
Writing & Translation
The translation was done by Ralph McCarthy. I think the translation was mostly fine. The story read very well.
However, the book did change perspectives very suddenly and abruptly, which I think might be difficult to follow for some readers. That being said, I have no idea whether going for longer passages from the perspective of one character might be better or worse, as a lot of the interactions between Kawashima and Chiaki were the small details or bits of dialogue between them. So I understand why the writer did what they did, so we didn't lose track of the happenings and thoughts from both characters in the moment, but I can see why it might be difficult to follow for others.
Characters
Kawashima Masayuki
Kawashima was struggling not to stab his newborn baby Rie. In order to quell his hand, he decided that he'd stab someone else, and he'd have to kill them too to get rid of the evidence.
It's fascinating to me that Kawashima didn't want to stab Rie. Why not? Why did he see stabbing Rie as wrong but stabbing someone else as fine? Was it because he cared for Yoko and Rie was an extension of that?
Kawashima explained that he grew up in an abusive household, where his mother was abusive to him but treated his younger brother perfectly well. She would seek forgiveness from him, but it's implied that he never fully forgave her. He also spent some time in a care home for mentally unstable children as well, and he talked about a child he met there who loved his pet rabbit and then suddenly killed it one day, only to look for another rabbit to take care of. So it makes sense that Kawashima is Not a normal guy by any means.
I think it's implied that Kawashima didn't share most of his past with Yoko. So I'm not sure how Yoko knew about his past trauma. I think she suspected that he had a lot of thoughts, but he hid it all very well. He even had a regular job in the time that this novel was set.
Kawashima had also lived with an older woman who was a prostitute. It was a dramatic relationship, as she'd have clients over but then get angry at Kawashima for not defending her fromt he men. She was the first and only person that Kawashima had stabbed. She'd survived, but Kawashima felt confident that she'd never show up in his life again.
Anyway, Kawashima approached this stabbing and murdering in a very clinical way, like he was doing a homework assignment. He'd booked a room in a hotel to work on it all, and when he felt he'd done a good job, he'd reward himself.
One night at the hotel, Kawashima had paid for an erotic massage, but it really felt like he wasn't particularly aroused by it. Well, he was, but more in a physical sense than an emotional sense. So he also doesn't have a normal relationship with sex, and might be on the asexual spectrum. But I think it was clearly established early on that the urge to stab wasn't necessarily sexual, just out of fascination.
When Kawashima's plan went awry, I felt that he panicked. He thought that Chiaki had seen his notes, so being as careful as he was, his first thought was that she needed to be gotten rid of. And as I mentioned, I think that was why he accepted the invitation to go to her house. Otherwise, if she hadn't seen the notes, it might have been fine for them just to have parted ways. However, even when he was in Chiaki's apartment, I felt like he still hadn't thought up of a plan to kill her. He was just going with the flow.
It wasn't until the drugs kicked in that he was pushed into acting out on instincts. He'd called for Yoko to help him, which I think showed that he actually did care for Yoko a lot, even if not in the traditional way. And after Chiaki assaulted him with the can opener, he retaliated, deciding to go ahead with stabbing her and cutting her achilles' tendon, though that did not go through as he fell unconscious.
When he woke up, Chiaki was piercing her nipple, and he simply asked her what she was doing. The ending for him is a little anti-climactic, but not bad in my opinion. Even if Kawashima went home without doing anything, this was An Experience, for him to meet such a woman. I think he referred to her as somewhat of a kindred spirit, someone who also battled demons as he did. Not that he saw her as a friend, but I think that she made him realize that he wasn't the only one. He was hiding his urges for so long, and here was Chiaki, who expressed them in a different way. He fully attempted murder on Chiaki and yet she still left him in her house.
In terms of Kawashima's takeaways, I think seeing her pierce her nipple maybe gave him some ideas? Not that he's going to get into self-mutilation right away, but maybe it made him realize that there are other ways to control his urges than the frightening one he thought of (stabbing another person instead of his own baby). I'm not completely sure about this though, this is just me being optimistic.
As I mentioned, there could very well be a possibility that he would battle the urge to stab again later, and he would retry his plan. It's hard to say whether this is an optimistic or pessimistic end.
Sanada Chiaki
Chiaki was the call girl from the S&M club. At first, she seemed pretty confident in her job, in the sense that she was well-practised and well-rehearsed. But she was shaken when the man at the phone booth yelled, as it reminded her of past trauma.
Her father had been sexually abusive towards her, and we learned the disgusting details of it. We also learned that she hallucinated a woman sometimes, called Whats-her-name. Sometimes Chiaki would observe herself in third person (which Whats-her-name) facilitated, and that was how she would deal with abuse, or when she was having sex that she didn't like.
Chiaki had tried to get Kawashima aroused at first, but it hadn't really worked. Kawashima thought that her attempts at being sexy were kind of silly, and laughed at her. Though it did break Chiaki's spirit a bit, I don't think she was that beaten up about it. Anyway, she asked to take a shower, I guess to break things up.
She self-mutilated while in Kawashima's hotel room, and Kawashima had soothed her to get her to stop. She'd never experienced such gentleness, so she really grew attached to him, thinking that he was her hero and such. When Kawashima was standoffish with her, she thought that (since Kawashima knew her real name) he was just a shy admirer, which made her love him even more. She definitely jumped to a lot of impulsive conclusions.
Anyway, up until Kawashima came to her house, she was still enamoured with him, and she was determined to seduce him. When she realized that things really weren't working, she put drugs into his food, which she would do for her other boyfriends. When the drugs started kicking in, Kawashima called out for Yoko, which really made Chiaki angry, as she then realize that he wasn't the prince that she thought he was. They had their scuffle and Kawashima threatened to cut her achilles' tendon and kill her but then he fainted due to the drugs.
Chiaki realized that she wasn't actually afraid of the pain when Kawashima had threatened her. I think the gist of it was that if she accepted the pain, then it wouldn't hurt as much. And as mentioned, the book ended with Chiaki piercing her own nipple, a form of pain.
I think that Chiaki's takeaway from this experience was simply just a wild experience with a john. She thought that Kawashima was a prince, and then she got angry when she realized that he wasn't her prince, and then they had a fight, but I don't think that Chiaki would take that fight too seriously. After all, she did leave him in her house instead of getting rid of him. I think Chiaki is used to weird situations in her line of work too, so I think that's why she was kind of so unfazed by the end.
Kawashima Yoko
Yoko was Kawashima's wife. She offered cooking classes in her home that were quite popular, and she'd recently given birth to her and Kawashima' baby daughter Rie.
From Kawashima's recollection of his wife, she seemed quite gentle and sympathetic, though it's unclear how much of his past he revealed to her. If she knew about his urges to stab, I think she might be sympathetic, but also maybe a little frightened, and depending on her views of the mentally ill, she might want to leave him. It's hard to say without too much information about her, especially from our biased narrator.
Themes
Urges & pain
Kawashima had concocted this entire plan to deal with his urge to stab Rie. If he had followed through with his urge, he would have actually stabbed Rie, but his conscience was strong enough to stop him, recognizing that Yoko and Rie were too important to him. This was one of the more fascinating things to me about Kawashima. I was very curious about his conscience.
Nonetheless, his conscience was not strong enough for not stabbing to be an option. The average person would not actually go out and stab a person to relieve an urge, but his urge was so strong that he needed to do it or else he might self-destruct.
On the flip side, I felt that Chiaki's approach to pain was kind of the opposite of an urge. For Kawashima, he needed to inflict pain to feel relief, whereas for Chiaki, she needed to expect the pain to feel relief.
Though both Kawashima and Chiaki were victims of abuse, they grew to express their urges differently. Kawashima had a more active role in gaining relief, whereas Chiaki, who was in a less fortunate position in society, could only learn how to cope with the pain.
Overall
A rather dark and frightening story. I do want to commend Murakami for this creative story but gosh was it terrifying. I kept getting so scared that Kawashima would actually cut someone's achilles' tendon because to me, that is just so scary and frightening and blood-curdling. I'm glad it didn't happen, but the imagery of it was still very strong in this book, as it was one of Kawashima's urges.
Spoilers.
Story
This story was about the meeting of two people. Kawashima Masayuki was a married man whose wife just had a baby. He was battling thoughts of wanting to stab the baby, which he knew was not the right thing to do, so he instead wanted to relieve his urge of needing to stab someone by planning to stab (and kill) a prostitute instead. He experienced trauma in the past and he clearly dealt with mental and emotional issues at the time of this novel.
Sanada Chiaki was a prostitute working for an S&M club who was called by Kawashima. He intended for her to be his victim. Chiaki was also a victim of abuse in the past, and though she didn't seem super unstable, I also wouldn't call her emotionally healthy. She was impulsive but also naive.
Kawashima called for Chiaki to come to his hotel room, where he planned to tie her down and murder her. However, things took a turn when Chiaki had a mental episode, and started stabbing herself. Kawashima managed to calm her down, through his past experience of being around other mentally unstable people.
From then on, the mindsets of these two characters changed dramatically. Kawashima's notes on murder were laid out, and so he believed that Chiaki had seen his notes and realized that he was going to kill her. So he saw her as someone who needed to be gotten rid of to protect himself. On the other hand, Chiaki saw Kawashima as a hero because he had calmed her down and shown her sympathy in a way that she'd never experienced. Chiaki thought that Kawashima was caring for her, when instead Kawashima was just trying to cover his ass.
Kawashima took Chiaki to the hospital to get her wound treated, and afterward they went to Chiaki's house. Chiaki tried to seduce Kawashima, as she saw Kawashima as her prince. In reality, Kawashima was simultaneously not attracted to Chiaki sexually, and he was trying to figure out a way to get rid of her. I suppose he agreed to go to her house just so he wouldn't lose track of her.
When Kawashima wasn't reacting to Chiaki's advances, she felt kind of rejected, and so she drugged Kawashima's food with halcion. As the drugs hit his system, he grew very violent with Chiaki. He attempted to tie her up and then cut her achilles' tendon (as he'd intended to back at the hotel), but he'd fainted from the drugs before he was able to.
As he was knocked out, Chiaki reflected on how she felt about the happenings, that she wasn't actually afraid when Kawashima threatened to cut her achilles' tendon. And as Kawashima woke up, Chiaki was piercing her other nipple.
It's a strange ending, but I suppose that hardly any ending would seem "normal" for such a wild story. Anything that happened would feel unpredictable to me.
In terms of what I think would happen after the end of the book, I think nothing would happen, for now. I think Kawashima would go back to his wife and child not having done what he'd set out to do, but at least he wasn't a murderer (yet). But I fear that the urge to stab would hit Kawashima again and he would try this all over again, or worse, he might stab his own family, as he had feared. As for Chiaki, I think she would keep going about her job as a call girl for am S&M club. But she does live a slightly dangerous life, so she might meet someone as frightening and dangerous as Kawashima in the future.
Writing & Translation
The translation was done by Ralph McCarthy. I think the translation was mostly fine. The story read very well.
However, the book did change perspectives very suddenly and abruptly, which I think might be difficult to follow for some readers. That being said, I have no idea whether going for longer passages from the perspective of one character might be better or worse, as a lot of the interactions between Kawashima and Chiaki were the small details or bits of dialogue between them. So I understand why the writer did what they did, so we didn't lose track of the happenings and thoughts from both characters in the moment, but I can see why it might be difficult to follow for others.
Characters
Kawashima Masayuki
Kawashima was struggling not to stab his newborn baby Rie. In order to quell his hand, he decided that he'd stab someone else, and he'd have to kill them too to get rid of the evidence.
It's fascinating to me that Kawashima didn't want to stab Rie. Why not? Why did he see stabbing Rie as wrong but stabbing someone else as fine? Was it because he cared for Yoko and Rie was an extension of that?
Kawashima explained that he grew up in an abusive household, where his mother was abusive to him but treated his younger brother perfectly well. She would seek forgiveness from him, but it's implied that he never fully forgave her. He also spent some time in a care home for mentally unstable children as well, and he talked about a child he met there who loved his pet rabbit and then suddenly killed it one day, only to look for another rabbit to take care of. So it makes sense that Kawashima is Not a normal guy by any means.
I think it's implied that Kawashima didn't share most of his past with Yoko. So I'm not sure how Yoko knew about his past trauma. I think she suspected that he had a lot of thoughts, but he hid it all very well. He even had a regular job in the time that this novel was set.
Kawashima had also lived with an older woman who was a prostitute. It was a dramatic relationship, as she'd have clients over but then get angry at Kawashima for not defending her fromt he men. She was the first and only person that Kawashima had stabbed. She'd survived, but Kawashima felt confident that she'd never show up in his life again.
Anyway, Kawashima approached this stabbing and murdering in a very clinical way, like he was doing a homework assignment. He'd booked a room in a hotel to work on it all, and when he felt he'd done a good job, he'd reward himself.
One night at the hotel, Kawashima had paid for an erotic massage, but it really felt like he wasn't particularly aroused by it. Well, he was, but more in a physical sense than an emotional sense. So he also doesn't have a normal relationship with sex, and might be on the asexual spectrum. But I think it was clearly established early on that the urge to stab wasn't necessarily sexual, just out of fascination.
When Kawashima's plan went awry, I felt that he panicked. He thought that Chiaki had seen his notes, so being as careful as he was, his first thought was that she needed to be gotten rid of. And as I mentioned, I think that was why he accepted the invitation to go to her house. Otherwise, if she hadn't seen the notes, it might have been fine for them just to have parted ways. However, even when he was in Chiaki's apartment, I felt like he still hadn't thought up of a plan to kill her. He was just going with the flow.
It wasn't until the drugs kicked in that he was pushed into acting out on instincts. He'd called for Yoko to help him, which I think showed that he actually did care for Yoko a lot, even if not in the traditional way. And after Chiaki assaulted him with the can opener, he retaliated, deciding to go ahead with stabbing her and cutting her achilles' tendon, though that did not go through as he fell unconscious.
When he woke up, Chiaki was piercing her nipple, and he simply asked her what she was doing. The ending for him is a little anti-climactic, but not bad in my opinion. Even if Kawashima went home without doing anything, this was An Experience, for him to meet such a woman. I think he referred to her as somewhat of a kindred spirit, someone who also battled demons as he did. Not that he saw her as a friend, but I think that she made him realize that he wasn't the only one. He was hiding his urges for so long, and here was Chiaki, who expressed them in a different way. He fully attempted murder on Chiaki and yet she still left him in her house.
In terms of Kawashima's takeaways, I think seeing her pierce her nipple maybe gave him some ideas? Not that he's going to get into self-mutilation right away, but maybe it made him realize that there are other ways to control his urges than the frightening one he thought of (stabbing another person instead of his own baby). I'm not completely sure about this though, this is just me being optimistic.
As I mentioned, there could very well be a possibility that he would battle the urge to stab again later, and he would retry his plan. It's hard to say whether this is an optimistic or pessimistic end.
Sanada Chiaki
Chiaki was the call girl from the S&M club. At first, she seemed pretty confident in her job, in the sense that she was well-practised and well-rehearsed. But she was shaken when the man at the phone booth yelled, as it reminded her of past trauma.
Her father had been sexually abusive towards her, and we learned the disgusting details of it. We also learned that she hallucinated a woman sometimes, called Whats-her-name. Sometimes Chiaki would observe herself in third person (which Whats-her-name) facilitated, and that was how she would deal with abuse, or when she was having sex that she didn't like.
Chiaki had tried to get Kawashima aroused at first, but it hadn't really worked. Kawashima thought that her attempts at being sexy were kind of silly, and laughed at her. Though it did break Chiaki's spirit a bit, I don't think she was that beaten up about it. Anyway, she asked to take a shower, I guess to break things up.
She self-mutilated while in Kawashima's hotel room, and Kawashima had soothed her to get her to stop. She'd never experienced such gentleness, so she really grew attached to him, thinking that he was her hero and such. When Kawashima was standoffish with her, she thought that (since Kawashima knew her real name) he was just a shy admirer, which made her love him even more. She definitely jumped to a lot of impulsive conclusions.
Anyway, up until Kawashima came to her house, she was still enamoured with him, and she was determined to seduce him. When she realized that things really weren't working, she put drugs into his food, which she would do for her other boyfriends. When the drugs started kicking in, Kawashima called out for Yoko, which really made Chiaki angry, as she then realize that he wasn't the prince that she thought he was. They had their scuffle and Kawashima threatened to cut her achilles' tendon and kill her but then he fainted due to the drugs.
Chiaki realized that she wasn't actually afraid of the pain when Kawashima had threatened her. I think the gist of it was that if she accepted the pain, then it wouldn't hurt as much. And as mentioned, the book ended with Chiaki piercing her own nipple, a form of pain.
I think that Chiaki's takeaway from this experience was simply just a wild experience with a john. She thought that Kawashima was a prince, and then she got angry when she realized that he wasn't her prince, and then they had a fight, but I don't think that Chiaki would take that fight too seriously. After all, she did leave him in her house instead of getting rid of him. I think Chiaki is used to weird situations in her line of work too, so I think that's why she was kind of so unfazed by the end.
Kawashima Yoko
Yoko was Kawashima's wife. She offered cooking classes in her home that were quite popular, and she'd recently given birth to her and Kawashima' baby daughter Rie.
From Kawashima's recollection of his wife, she seemed quite gentle and sympathetic, though it's unclear how much of his past he revealed to her. If she knew about his urges to stab, I think she might be sympathetic, but also maybe a little frightened, and depending on her views of the mentally ill, she might want to leave him. It's hard to say without too much information about her, especially from our biased narrator.
Themes
Urges & pain
Kawashima had concocted this entire plan to deal with his urge to stab Rie. If he had followed through with his urge, he would have actually stabbed Rie, but his conscience was strong enough to stop him, recognizing that Yoko and Rie were too important to him. This was one of the more fascinating things to me about Kawashima. I was very curious about his conscience.
Nonetheless, his conscience was not strong enough for not stabbing to be an option. The average person would not actually go out and stab a person to relieve an urge, but his urge was so strong that he needed to do it or else he might self-destruct.
On the flip side, I felt that Chiaki's approach to pain was kind of the opposite of an urge. For Kawashima, he needed to inflict pain to feel relief, whereas for Chiaki, she needed to expect the pain to feel relief.
Though both Kawashima and Chiaki were victims of abuse, they grew to express their urges differently. Kawashima had a more active role in gaining relief, whereas Chiaki, who was in a less fortunate position in society, could only learn how to cope with the pain.
Overall
A rather dark and frightening story. I do want to commend Murakami for this creative story but gosh was it terrifying. I kept getting so scared that Kawashima would actually cut someone's achilles' tendon because to me, that is just so scary and frightening and blood-curdling. I'm glad it didn't happen, but the imagery of it was still very strong in this book, as it was one of Kawashima's urges.