By Ryu Murakami
From the writer of Audition, a wickedly satirical and wildly humorous story of an intergenerational conflict of the sexes.
In his so much irreverent novel but, Ryu Murakami creates a contention of epic proportions among six aimless youths and 6 tough-as-nails girls who conflict for keep an eye on of a Tokyo local. on the outset, the younger males appear louche yet innocuous, their actions constrained to consuming, snacking, peering at a unadorned neighbor via a window, and appearing karaoke. The six "aunties" are fiercely self sustaining profession girls. whilst one of many boys executes a deadly ambush of 1 of the ladies, chaos ensues. the ladies band jointly to discover the killer and specified revenge. In flip, the lads buckle down, learn physics, and plot to take out their nemeses in one blast. Who knew lethal "gang war" may be such enjoyable? Murakami builds the clash right into a hilarious, spot-on satire of recent tradition and the tensions among the sexes and generations.
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Example text
27 In Japan, no less than in industrializing societies like France, Germany, and Italy, as memory of the war receded and the harsh sacrifices exacted by two earlier wars with China and Russia faded, the heroism of production was being replaced by heroic consumption. What resulted was not so much a clash between newer and established values as a struggle of desire against values in general. For ordinary people in the 1920s, the “pluck of Meiji” and the obsession with “rising in the world” (risshin shusse) (as Earl Kinmonth has so aptly described this earlier petit bourgeois ideology, “making it”) that seemed to encapsulate so much of the Meiji march to realize “wealth and power” and encourage endless deprivation gave way to the search for comfort and pleasure, leisure and play.
Until 1913 capital industries such as branches of heavy industry were not profitable in the world market, and Japan was in no position to compete with more developed industrial societies. Moreover, the country had not yet recovered from the expenses of the earlier Russo-Japanese War. But all of this was to change as Japan became a member of the allied coalition but was spared any active involvement in the theater of fighting (excepting small operations in North China and the Pacific Islands). During the war, the economy enjoyed a positive boom and relative prosperity because of its role as a supplier to the allied cause.
The new modern life was figured first in discourse, as fantasy, before it was ubiquitously lived as experience, and its major elements were independent women, commodities, and mass consumption. What this fantasizing discourse inadvertently inspired was not only the fear of progressive social disorder and conflict but also the growing sense that the processes guaranteeing cultural reproduction (not to forget biological reproduction) were in danger of disappearing altogether. If the formation of mass culture produced overdetermination as the historical sign of the crisis of social indeterminacy, the modern girl was its contemporary trope.
