Piercing

February 19, 2007
In this short, tense and brutally eloquent thriller from Japanese author Murakami (In the Miso Soup
), Kawashima Masayuki, a young urban professional, faces the terrible fear he will stab his baby daughter, Rie, just as he once stabbed the stripper he lived with when he was 19. He decides killing a young prostitute will alleviate the building pressure inside him and protect both Rie and his sweet wife, Yoko. He plans everything meticulously, but what he doesn't bargain for is that his intended victim, Sanada Chiaki, an s&m worker, is as disturbed as he is. During their appointment, Chiaki experiences a "Nightmare" episode that results in a twisted game of cat-and-mouse. Murakami doesn't waste a word or a movement in this near-haiku of a tale that's breathless with anxiety and fraught with pain.

March 1, 2007
Murakami ("Almost Transparent Blue") offers a twisted psycho-thriller that examines child abuse, obsession, and power in postmodern Japan. Kawashima Masayuki is a husband and father who hears voices in his head telling him to stab soft flesh with an ice pick. When his wife almost catches him touching his baby's face with an ice pick, Kawashima decides to go on sabbatical and fulfill his psychopathic desire to stab a woman in her stomach. For that purpose, he arranges to hire a prostitute, whose Achilles heel he also intends to cut. Sanada Chiaki, the prostitute who arrives, is a woman haunted by her sexually abusive father and obsessed with self-mutilation, suicidal thoughts, and a passion for piercing her own body. When these two damaged people come together, twisted plans and imaginary voices clash, and awful visions are brought to light. This dark, sexually charged, and thrilling short novel is a strong academic collection choice.Ronald Samul, New London, CT

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2007
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)