In the Miso Soup

Japanese novelist tours Tokyo’s seedy nightlife

By Will Dean

The last decade has seen Japan bound up the cultural radar. Be it the gore of films like The Ring and Battle Royale, the fiction of the likes of Haruki Murakami (no relation) or US takes on Japanese culture like Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha and Sophia Coppolla’s fabulous Lost in Translation.

Murakami (Ryu, that is) takes this baton and runs with it. In Miso, we meet Kenji, a local tour guide who takes foreigners (gaijin) through Tokyo’s seedier nightspots looking for evening pleasures.

Straight away Kenji meets Frank, an American with a resemblance to Ed Harris (presumably this description is Murakami pre-emptively casting the film adaptation). Frank is a liar and this, allied with stories in the paper about murdered school-girls leads Kenji to believe that this American sex-tourist might be his scariest customer yet. And, sure enough, we follow Kenji as Frank drags him into his nomadic world of senseless killings.

It works reasonably well, but the novella size of the story constricts further details about Japan’s fascinating capital. Basically, we meet Frank. We suspect Frank is a bit nasty. Frank proves it. The end.

It’s not until Frank explains his actions in the last third of the book that we get anything of substance. Frank tells Kenji that the reason the Japanese are so insular as a nation is that, like the US, they have never been invaded and had to accommodate the ways of others.

That’s the problem here really, the book, excuse the pun, loses something in translation. Do we need the word ‘wanker’ translated back into English? It makes the book sound flat-footed. The descriptions of Tokyo are also brief; because the original Japanese audience don’t need telling that the Roppongi and Kubuchi-ko districts are the heart of the city’s seedy nightlife – ie an English novelist wouldn’t describe Soho in vivid detail.

Don’t let that put you off completely; In the Miso Soup is a tasty insight into the grubbier side of Japan and worth the hour or two it will take you to read it.