Piercing

This novel by Ryu Murakami which explores the dark side of the human mind takes us to the edge of what a person is capable of doing just to exercise his demons.

In the book, Kawashima Masayuki, a yuppie in urban Japan, is struggling to fight for the longest time the urge to stab his young daughter with an ice pick. Wrestling with his inner self, he finally decides to embark on a journey to fight the demons that have been tormenting him due to a previous experience wherein as a teenager he stabbed a stripper who turned out to be...

“Only voices and images from external world could neutralize those from the inside”

Kawashima Masayuki finally devises an obscene plan to kill a prostitute to liberate him and protect his wife Yoko and daughter Rie from his demonic obsession.

But Chiaki, a prostitute he hired who specialized in S & M plays while holed up in a hotel room to carry out his plans, turned out to be a disturbed soul herself.

Together they went deep into the realms of their psyches as they relived their past experiences and tried to find answers to their questions in the process.

Murakami’s cold- blooded story- telling wherein sometimes was a bit overboard owing to his very fertile imagination will be a shock to the faint-hearted, but to the initiated in this genre, there’s really nothing new to offer that we haven’t read nor seen in the past.