69 (Kodansha Modern Writers)

Ryu Murakami, along with Haruki Murakami (no relation), is one of the best-selling writers in Japan and a major figure in contemporary popular culture. Since publishing his first work, Almost Transparent Blue, which won Japan's most coveted literary prize in 1976, Ryu has produced a steady stream of novels, stories, and essays that consistently astound and delight readers with their wild flights of imagination, irreverent humor, and brilliant, convincing portraits of some of the quirkiest characters in Japanese literature.

69 is a roman a clef about coming of age during a time that left its mark on baby boomers around the world--a time when we really believed we could change the world before it changed us. By turns hilarious, cynical, frivolous, and poignant, the book is infused from start to finish with Ryu's relentless energy and optimism; it simply refuses to get tedious, preachy, or "literary" for a single moment.

The book is composed of the following: "Arthur Rimbaud," "Iron Butterfly," "Lady Jane," "Daniel Cohn-Bendit," "Claudia Cardinale," "Power to the Imagination," "Just Like a Woman," "Alain Delon," "Lyndon Johnson," "Cheap Thrills," "Amore Romantico," "Wes Montgomery," "Led Zeppelin," "April Come She Will," "Velvet Underground," and "It's a Beautiful Day."

Ryu Murakami was seventeen in 1969. The only son of schoolteacher parents, he grew up in the port city of Sasebo in southwestern Japan. After graduating from a local high school, where he played the drums in a band called Coelacanth, he went to an art college in Tokyo. It was while studying there that he entered his first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, in a competition for new writers. Published in 1976, the book won a major literary award and sold over a million copies. Since then, he has worked for a publishing house, presented a weekly music and interview radio program, and hosted a TV talk show. His literary output includes two collections of stories Run, Takahashi (1985) and Topaz (1988), and the novel Coin Locker Babies (1980), which made its debut in English early in 1995. He has also directed four movies based on his writing, causing a sensation at an Italian film festival when Tokyo Decadence was shown there in 1992. His latest film is set in the U.S. and Cuba.

The translator: Ralph F. McCarthy is a writer, lyricist, and translator from Michigan and California who has spent many years in Tokyo. Among his other translations are Self Portraits and Blue Bamboo, both collections of short stories by Osamu Dazai.