Japanese writer Ryu Murakami, author of "Almost Transparent Blue" and "Coin Locker Babies," has died at the age of 74. The writer's death was reported on Friday, October 23, by Japan News, citing NUR.KZ, according to infohub.kz.
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the writer's real name was Ryunosuke Murakami. He was born in 1952. A well-known Japanese author, his work often features elements of surrealism.
Murakami rose to widespread fame with his scandalous, decadent novel "Almost Transparent Blue," published in 1976. The work was based on the author's memories of a wild youth spent near a U.S. naval base — a place full of foreign temptations.
"His prose often features elements of American pop culture and hegemony, serving as markers of the emotional emptiness or nihilism characteristic of Japan's 'generation of emptiness,'" the writer's profile says.
As the encyclopedia notes, some of his early novels bear a distant resemblance to Haruki Murakami's "Trilogy of the Rat" — the author with whom he is often confused. In his later novel "Coin Locker Babies," however, he turns to the cyberpunk genre popular at the time to tell a story based on a prosaic Tokyo urban myth: the fate of two orphans abandoned by their parents at a train station.
Among Murakami's many works that go beyond genre fiction, the 1987 novel "Love and Fantasy Fascism" deserves particular attention. In it, Japan of the near future becomes a brutal dystopia built on the principles of social Darwinism and then, having acquired nuclear weapons, takes a leading position on the world stage.