Piercing - Hardcover

Ryū Murakami

3.68

13,909 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747582203 ISBN 13: 9780747582205

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2007

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*One of Literary Hub's "Ten Works of Literary Horror You Should Read (Even if You Don't Think You Like Horror)"*

A pulsating psycho-thriller from Ryu Murakami, author of In the Miso Soup

A renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami—a musician, filmmaker (Tokyo Decadence), TV personality, and award-winning author—has gained a cult following in the West. His first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, won Japan’s most coveted literary prize and sold over a million copies, and his most recent psychosexual thriller, In the Miso Soup, gave readers a further taste of his incredibly agile imagination. In Piercing, Murakami, in his own unique style, explores themes of child abuse and what happens to the voiceless among us, weaving a disturbing, spare tale of two people who find each other and then are forced into hurting each other deeply because of the haunting specter of their own abuse as children.

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About the Author:

Ryu Murakami, musician, filmmaker, TV talk show host, and novelist, is the author of Almost Transparent Blue, 69, and Coin Locker Babies, which the Washington Post praised as "a knockout . . . a great big pulsating parable."

From Booklist:

Kawashima survived a hideously abusive childhood and, as isn't unusual in such cases, bears the scars. Voices in his head, accompanied by garish images, urge him to re-create his stabbing, when a teenager, of the stripper who was his brutal mother. Because "only voices and images from the external world could neutralize those from inside," Kawashima's greatest fear is not of death but of blindness and deafness. When fantasies of stabbing his infant daughter as she sleeps in her crib start to dominate his consciousness, he lies to his unsuspecting wife, takes a hotel room, and meticulously plots to murder an S&M prostitute--who is petite, so he can more easily overcome her. Certainly not for the squeamish or faint-hearted, Piercing blends a cold-blooded true-crime ambience and unexpected, almost antic humor as best-laid plans go horribly awry when an equally scarred (she's a compulsive cutter) abuse survivor turned S&M prostitute enters the action. Oddly and thoroughly compelling as well as chilling, and neither black comedy nor horror, this is a strangely entertaining novel. Whitney Scott
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