A review by paul_cornelius
Popular Hits of the Showa Era by Ryū Murakami
5.0
Filled with passages describing abject horror, Popular Hits balances those images with a fusion of absurdist humor into what is a brutal social commentary. But it's the abject horror that predominates. It's probably a coincidence that the novel came out around the same time that Barbara Creed picked up Kristeva's notion of abjection and applied it towards a study of horror, especially the film, Alien. No matter. It can help to understand what is going on in Popular Hits. Horror relies on the abject to create its most central effect--making you cover your eyes or look away from something repulsive or disgusting. You are saying in effect "I am not that," with "that" being a corpse, a defiled body, a mangled result of torture. The abject tears down or crosses borders meant to uphold order or social hierarchy. (If you can be infected and turned into a cannibal zombie or your body used to incubate a monster from another world, then the social order must be teetering on anarchy.) So you look away, as opposed, for example, to the image of the grotesque, which often absorbs your stare or makes you look even deeper or longer into an image that is surprising and disturbing. For instance, I always think of the dog with the human face that appears in the 1978 version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You're startled but you don't look away. You focus more intensely on it.
Murakami's novel dwells on situations that escalate from murder to civil war and finally to a poor man's holocaust. It might be too much so, were it not for the fact that he also laces these passages with comedy in an absurdist environment. Briefly, Popular Hits is the story of a gang war, one fought between a group of young sub-lumpen men, wastrels and failures who can only be motivated by pop songs into anything resembling life, and a group of middle aged women in their late thirties, all of them divorcees who define themselves by the branding of consumer goods they absorb, including some of the same pop songs that appeal to the young men. Both groups are merely a different slice of a diseased and degenerate culture that cannot produce anything more than responses to physical stimuli. Murakami does not provide any redeeming figure or situation.
Murakami's novel dwells on situations that escalate from murder to civil war and finally to a poor man's holocaust. It might be too much so, were it not for the fact that he also laces these passages with comedy in an absurdist environment. Briefly, Popular Hits is the story of a gang war, one fought between a group of young sub-lumpen men, wastrels and failures who can only be motivated by pop songs into anything resembling life, and a group of middle aged women in their late thirties, all of them divorcees who define themselves by the branding of consumer goods they absorb, including some of the same pop songs that appeal to the young men. Both groups are merely a different slice of a diseased and degenerate culture that cannot produce anything more than responses to physical stimuli. Murakami does not provide any redeeming figure or situation.