Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2010

It’s tough being the second most famous in fiction. Not too long ago, my girlfriend got all the way to the end of Ryu Murakami’s Almost Transparent Blue before realizing, with not inconsiderable disappointment, that it wasn’t by Haruki. I should state for the record that my girlfriend is Japanese and, to the best of my knowledge, completely literate.

Murakami—Ryu, that is—hasn’t published a new novel since 2005’s Hanto wo Deyo (“Leave the Peninsula”), a dense, extensively researched slab of near-futurism in which Japan’s economy has collapsed and the country is reduced to international pariah status—then invaded by North Korea. It was a good indicator of the author’s present concerns: he is an avid follower of current affairs, running his own online news services—Japan Mail Media and Ryu’s Video Report—and appearing on TV Tokyo every Monday evening to interview leading economists for Ryu’s Talking Live.

There are hints of these developing interests in Audition, the latest of Murakami’s novels to appear in English (though originally published in Japanese in 1997). Early on in, the author drops a lucid analysis of Japan’s postwar development into the narrative, seemingly out of nowhere: “People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful loneliness was born,” he writes. “Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur.” It’s a view that will be borne out in the course of this bleakly satirical shocker, though the social commentary element is quickly ditched.

Forty-two-year-old Aoyama runs a video production company and has been raising his son single-handedly since his wife died from cancer seven years earlier. Professional success hasn’t been enough to stave off depression, so he concedes to his son’s suggestion to look for a new wife. His best friend, film producer Yoshikawa, proposes holding a bogus audition and using it to screen potential mates—a scheme whose dodgy moral implications the pair both quickly brush aside.

Confronted with an abundance of options, Aoyama finds himself drawn to Asami Yamasaki, a beautiful, mysterious 24-year-old who trained as a ballerina before being forced to drop out due to injury. Convinced that he’s found the perfect match, he ignores the warnings of Yoshikawa and others, all of whom are creeped out by his prospective bride-to-be, setting the stage for a macabre denouement.

If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen Takeshi Miike’s 1999 film version, which sticks closely to the original storyline while amplifying the weirdness—and, yes, the nastiness of the finale. There’s a line of thought that the most successful movie adaptations take decent rather than spectacular books as their source material, and that certainly holds true here. Immediately after reading Audition, I rewatched Miike’s film for the first time in years, and while it hasn’t aged well, it still eclipses the original.

Part of that is thanks to the visceral power of images, but it’s also because of the occasional liberties that Miike takes with the narrative, inserting dream sequences, ambiguities and disorientating flashbacks that shed previous events in a different light. The novel itself is more linear, and rather less interesting; towards the end, when Murakami offers a brief aside to explain his villain’s psychology, it’s such a cheap shot that you almost wish he hadn’t bothered.

This isn’t a bad book, by any stretch, but its release comes about a decade too late. Kudos to Bloomsbury for continuing to make Murakami’s work available in English, but Audition is strictly for completists.