Ryu Murakami and the horror of the mundane
I’m not much of a horror fan, especially when it comes in book form. Inevitably, I’ll convince myself that a horror book is much less scary than a movie because there’s no soundtrack and nobody jumping out of closets at you, and I’ll sit down and read one. When I’m about a third of the way in, and invested in the story, I’ll remember why book-horror is so much worse. You have to participate actively in it. You can’t just sit back and absorb the audio-visual scares passively. Somehow, it feels like the act of reading is what makes the bad things happen in the first place. If I haven’t read a section, it hasn’t happened. The process of reading slowly brings the events into existence. I feel responsible.
Of course, Japanese horror is its own animal. I read The Ring and loved it, despite myself. Ryu Murakami’s Audition hit many of the same notes, but it had one unfortunate failing: the ending.
I’m a big fan of contemporary Japanese fiction, and a devout reader of Haruki Murakami. In fact, one of the reasons I adore David Mitchell is because his work is flavoured so distinctly by the time he spent in Japan. One of the most common tropes across all genres is the sheer drudgery and dullness of life. Characters are ordinary, live grey lives in indistinct places, muse passively about their existence but don’t do much to change anything. In Japanese horror, the fear is often closely linked to this mundane state – fear of vanishing, of being dragged down, of fading away, of depression. Subtlety is key.
Ryu Murakami does a masterful job of creating his bland-as-white-bread protagonist and putting him in a crazy whirlwind as he auditions for, and dates, his future wife. Foreshadowing is slathered on in spades. The creepiness rises steadily as the protagonist encounters his new girlfriend’s previous victims. I felt the dread increading with each page. At one point, I thought I’d reached the climax of the novel: the protagonist wakes up, alone, with a letter from the girlfriend promising vengeance for some unknown slight. His son is home, alone, hundreds of kilometres away. ‘No,’ I thought, with the shiver of certainty, ‘She wouldn’t!’
But then it turns out, she didn’t. The actual climax – filled with blood and guts and a screaming madwoman – was almost farcical. All the built-up dread melted away. The subtle, creeping horror was washed away in a wave of cheese and gore. If I’d stopped 20 pages earlier, I would have called the novel a supreme work of horror. Unfortunately I didn’t. It’s amazing how a whole book’s worth can be defined by the last handful of pages.
Overall it’s a good book (or rather, novella), filled with comedy and ridiculous moments and depth, as all good novels should be. I’ll definitely check out the film, too. In a way, I’m glad the end was so visceral and action-filled, because it pulled me out from the morass of dread that I was wallowing in. A good book for people who are ambivalent about horror.
