Reviews

The third of this prolific Japanese author's 30 novels to appear in English, this is a cyber-Bildungsroman of playful breadth and uncertain depth. Two mothers abandon their infant boys in the Yokohama train station's coin lockers. The reader is not spared the mechanics of packaging a child in a parcel, nor the grim details of any of the other episodes of discomfort and suffering which follow in incremental doses, though always with such whimsy that the reader wonders whether or not to be offended. The heroes, Kiku and Hashi, grow up together; but, beyond their bizarre beginnings, they couldn't be more different. Kiku becomes a homicidal pole-vaulter whose inner rage gives him unusual speed and strength, but which also fosters an obsession with murder and a secret drug that sets any creature into a killing frenzy. The more delicate Hashi strives to find his mother, supporting himself as a prostitute in Toxitown‘a chemical disaster zone insulated from Tokyo by a wall and armed guards‘until one of his johns discovers his musical talent and makes him a star. The settings seem lifted from Japanese animation epics: an abandoned mining town, an underwater tunnel and a retreat in the mountains. At times, Murakami rambles, as in the case of a taxi driver's pointless monologue or the long interviews with women who might be Hashi's mother. Such digressions, however, are less the product of careless craft than of a lush and frantic imagination overwhelming its own project. Though expansive and exciting as its scope, the novel is as unfocused as its troubled heroes. (Apr.)

In 69 (LJ 9/15/93) Murakami's last novel published in English, the prevailing tone was one of hip innocence. In Coin Locker Babies, any hint of innocence is decidedly absent. The coin locker babies of the title are two abandoned infants rescued from train station lockers, and the novel follows their adventures through boyhood into manhood. They wander through the sort of hellish, surreal landscape usually associated with dismal sf visions of the future, but in this book the hell is contemporary Japan. The journeys of the two are relentlessly dark and disturbing: matricide, violent sex, mutilation, vengeance, insanity, perversion, and mass destruction are all explored, usually graphically and with relish. The work of Murakami‘who is also a filmmaker‘begs comparison with film. Robocop comes to mind as bearing the closest resemblance to this novel, although the book lacks the satiric edge that many claimed to have found in that film. Large collections with a particular interest in contemporary fiction may find a place for this. Otherwise, it is not recommended.‘Mark Woodhouse, Elmira Coll. Lib., N.Y.