Absolute ego dance

About two-thirds of the way through Ryu Murakami's In The Miso Soup things turn nasty but not in a way that should surprise the reader. The energetically paced short novel was always leading up to this. The shock is how long the violence is sustained. Although the scene runs for several pages it is not as gripping as the build-up to it. The tension of nightclub guide Kenji wondering if his client is a killer plays like a very crowded version of Dorothy B Hughes' In a Lonely Place. (Is Frank a murderer? Is he? Is he? Is he? He is!) Reviews call Miso Soup a philosophical novel. It's a sort of philosophy: James M Cain and Jim Thompson also followed it. Murakami's novel was published in 1997: the author was born in 1952. That surprised me. He writes younger. Perhaps it requires age to be so reckless.