About the Author

Born in 1952 in Nagasaki prefecture, Ryu Murakami is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature. Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first book, a novel about a group of young people drowned in sex and drugs, he has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society. His novels include Coin Locker Babies, Sixty- Nine, Popular Hits of the Showa Era, Audition and In the Miso Soup and From the Fatherland, with Love. Murakami is also a screenwriter and a director; his films include Tokyo Decadence, Audition and Because of You.

Translated by Ralph McCarthy, Charles De Wolf and Ginny Tapley Takemori

Reviews

A troubled meditation on the soul of modern Japan... Alarmingly pertinent in light of current British politics... A morbidly funny comedy... Above all, it is a phenomenal feat of storytelling 700 pages, dozens of characters and scores of ideas woven into one gripping whole. -- Andrzej Lukowski Metro This is a novel by the other Murakami. Not Haruki... If Haruki is The Beatles of Japanese literature, Ryu is its Rolling Stones... [From the Fatherland, with Love] has a Tolstoyan cast of characters, from crack North Korean commandos and hapless Japanese bureaucrats to a gang of hoodlums who eventually decide to save Japan. It unfolds with the pace of a thriller... -- David Pilling Financial Times Massively ambitious and uncompromising... prescient in unexpected ways -- Joanne Hayden Sunday Business Post [Mixes] the thrills of a spy novel with some national soul-searching -- Lionel Barber Financial Times, Summer Books ...a truly unhinged bit of satire... this long and very strange political novel by the "other" Murakami seems even more beady-eyed after Fukushima... Sunday Telegraph