The mis-selling of Ryu Murakami
One thing that is inordinately frustrating with how Japanese media, particularly fiction is sold in the west, is that almost without fail it will revert to a series of stereotypical codes and conventions. Japanese fiction is often sold on the basis of it's exoticism, orientalism, it's quirkiness and often a whimsical quality. These qualities are often emphasised regardless of the book that is being sold. Of course, these stereotypes are primarily utilised for commercial purposes. For the perceived and constructed Western audience, Japan is indeed an exotic quirky orient, a non-threatening binary to the normative hegemonic values of the West. Of course, Japan is an enormously populated country with an extremely densely cultivated tradition of the arts, not unlike the UK. The Japanese music industry is still one of the biggest in the world, and it's contributions to literature, videogames and cinema are well documented.
However, when it comes to discussing Japanese media in any context outside of enthusiast press, the writer will invariably touch on a few, easily identifiable cornerstones. For cinema with have Hayao Miyazaki and Akira Kurosawa. For music, perhaps Yellow Magic Orchestra. For videogames, maybe Final Fantasy. And of course for literature, we have Haruki Murakami. All these cultural touchstones are so easily listed precisely because they embody a set of comfortable and easily identifiable (and profitable) stereotypes. Whimsy, exoticism, tradition, tradition, and a po-faced kookiness that is of course intrinsic to Japan.
An issue arises when we have an author who deviates from this expected mold. Ryu Murakami (often referred to as the other Murakami, as if it was a particularly uncommon surname) often writes about Japanese themes, of nationalism, multiculturalism, social-status and societal ennui. Yet he is much harder to pigeon-hole as a quintessentially Japanese author, at least from the hyperreal expectations established by Western book publishers. Ryu Murakami's novel flit from genre to genre, for one thing, and encompass theme of paranoia, transgression, obsession, and gallows humour. In fact, while his novels do deal with explicitly Japanese themes, his prose and subject matter bares far more resemblance to Western authors such as Georges Bataille and Bret Easton Ellis than the pre-appointed cannon of accepted Japanese pop-lit. His debut, Almost Transparent Blue oozes the same desperation as Hubert Selby Jr.s Last Exit To Brooklyn or Georges Bataille's Blue of Noon. Piercing reads like a particularly frank and unpleasant western psychosexual thriller film, perhaps in the same vein as Fatal Attraction, though stripped of any affectation or sentimentality. Rather alarmingly, Popular Hits Of The Showa Era reads like an apocalyptic take on Beavis and Butthead, as ridiculous as it is nihilistic.
Yet following the 2001 film adaptation of his novel Audition , a minor hit in the West at a time when 'Asia extreme' was a buzzword and a whole host of directors such as Hideo Nakata, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike became household names, Murakami's books began to trickle in to the West. One publisher who took the chance on Murakami was Bloomsbury books. And the covers that they devised for the Western releases not only utterly ghastly from a design perspective, but also deliberately and cynically misell the novels they published.
However, when it comes to discussing Japanese media in any context outside of enthusiast press, the writer will invariably touch on a few, easily identifiable cornerstones. For cinema with have Hayao Miyazaki and Akira Kurosawa. For music, perhaps Yellow Magic Orchestra. For videogames, maybe Final Fantasy. And of course for literature, we have Haruki Murakami. All these cultural touchstones are so easily listed precisely because they embody a set of comfortable and easily identifiable (and profitable) stereotypes. Whimsy, exoticism, tradition, tradition, and a po-faced kookiness that is of course intrinsic to Japan.
An issue arises when we have an author who deviates from this expected mold. Ryu Murakami (often referred to as the other Murakami, as if it was a particularly uncommon surname) often writes about Japanese themes, of nationalism, multiculturalism, social-status and societal ennui. Yet he is much harder to pigeon-hole as a quintessentially Japanese author, at least from the hyperreal expectations established by Western book publishers. Ryu Murakami's novel flit from genre to genre, for one thing, and encompass theme of paranoia, transgression, obsession, and gallows humour. In fact, while his novels do deal with explicitly Japanese themes, his prose and subject matter bares far more resemblance to Western authors such as Georges Bataille and Bret Easton Ellis than the pre-appointed cannon of accepted Japanese pop-lit. His debut, Almost Transparent Blue oozes the same desperation as Hubert Selby Jr.s Last Exit To Brooklyn or Georges Bataille's Blue of Noon. Piercing reads like a particularly frank and unpleasant western psychosexual thriller film, perhaps in the same vein as Fatal Attraction, though stripped of any affectation or sentimentality. Rather alarmingly, Popular Hits Of The Showa Era reads like an apocalyptic take on Beavis and Butthead, as ridiculous as it is nihilistic.
Yet following the 2001 film adaptation of his novel Audition , a minor hit in the West at a time when 'Asia extreme' was a buzzword and a whole host of directors such as Hideo Nakata, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike became household names, Murakami's books began to trickle in to the West. One publisher who took the chance on Murakami was Bloomsbury books. And the covers that they devised for the Western releases not only utterly ghastly from a design perspective, but also deliberately and cynically misell the novels they published.
The Japanese edition of Audition is somewhat straightforward, yet evocative and troubling. We are positioned as Aoyama, the protagonist in an uncomfortable closeup, presumably as he auditions his potential future wife. The subject's face is inscrutable, yet perhaps vulnerable. Most importantly, the cover establishes a key themes of the narrative, including female objectification, without divulging anything concrete about the narrative itself.
Bloomsbury's UK edition lacks any form of subtlety. Referring to an event that occurs in the final chapter of the book, it makes explicit reference to the iconography of the 'acclaimed cult movie'. The artist has also chosen to represent Asami as some leering banshee, which is fundamentally contrapuntal to the novel itself (Asami keeps her composure throughout the famous final scene in both the book and the film adaptation). Additionally, the cover is a glaring spoiler, and completely unnecessary (a more elegant alternative may involve an extreme close-up of a ballerina's toes, or even a hypodermic syringe). Most frustrating of all is how the artist has seemingly attempted to emulate an 'anime style', which is both wincingy embarrassing, completely beside the point of the novel,and of course a sweepingly reductive stereotype. We see these tropes echoed across all three novels published by Bloomsbury.
The Japanese cover to Piercing is not particularly striking, though it is vague and band enough to conceal the slight novel's themes and ideas. Note how while the cover is drawn, the soft pencils are as far removed from 'anime' sensibilities as they could be.
The Bloomsbury cover once more utilises this bizarre faux 'anime' style, and also includes a stereotypical blurry and out of focus tokyo backdrop. While stylistically it's over-obvious, ultimately this cover is less frustrating than Audition's. It establishes a theme of a 'woman in peril', which the book itself then goes on to subvert.
Penguin's edition is vastly more satisfying, and manages to be bold and outre without resorting to tired stereotypes.
The Georgian cover to Piercing is perhaps a little on the nose, yet manages to encompass the novels themes of sex, violence, confusion and paranoia very accurately.
Finally and perhaps the most frustrating is the cover for In The Miso Soup. Once more an exceptionally taught psychothriller, Miso actually focusses on anxieties presented by the arrival of a foreign interloper, an American who embodies a range of negative Japanese stereotypes about Western people. Murakami of course characteristically pushes these stereotypes for transgressive and satirical purposes.The cover is exceptional. A white male face is distorted, his nose elongated, his eyes stretched in some sort of ethnic parody, The title of the book is written in katakana, emphasising the themes of Western intrusion. It's positioning over the face of the subject anchors the ideas of the novel further. Yet it also creates a binary opposition between a Western threat and the archetypal Japanese dish, miso soup. Clearly, In The Miso Soup is a novel that explores the anxieties that surround orientalism, a horror narrative that explores the notion of the other.
Perhaps as expected, the Bloomsbury edition doesn't even try to telegraph the nuance of the book, instead promising pop-violence and exoticim for a novel that really lacks much of either.
Of course, who reads a book for it's cover? It may sound churlish to moan and groan about what image has been used to most effectively sell a series of particularly hard to sell books in the most efficient manner possible. Readers picking up these novels on the promises their covers make are likely to have their preconceptions shattered, and will undoubtedly be challenged by the transgressive and unrelentingly unpleasant subject matter. Yet beyond the use of stereotypes and the bad taste left in the mouth at art being mishandled by an uncaring capitalist system, the most frustrating aspect of these covers is the utter contempt that they have for British readers. All three assume that the only reason to read these books is for their exotic qualities, selling a quality of 'Japanicity' as opposed to allowing them to exist purely as exceptionally structured and challenging psycho-thrillers.
While Bloomsbury's covers are of course particularly embarrassing, British publisher Pushkin Press have published several Murakami books with much greater stylistic success. More orientated around typeface than image, yet both striking and enigmatic, the cover to Popular Hits Of The Showa Era manages to evoke the farcical conflict central to the novel's structure without resorting to tired stereotypes.
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