Ryū Murakami, the Japanese novelist whose 1997 book Audition became one of the most notorious exports of the J-horror boom once Takashi Miike turned it into a film, has died at 74. According to his longtime publisher, Gentosha, he died at home on October 17; the news only reached international outlets this week, and no cause of death has been made public.
Murakami’s debut novel, Almost Transparent Blue, won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers and the Akutagawa Prize in 1976, when he was just 24, and went on to sell roughly 3.5 million copies. He followed it with Coin Locker Babies in 1980, a novel about abandoned infants that won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers, and kept writing for the next five decades, publishing more than forty novels and story collections.
It’s Audition, however, that cemented his place in horror. The novel follows a widowed film producer who stages a fake casting call to find himself a new wife, and it gave Miike the material for a 1999 film whose reputation for squirm-inducing violence still precedes it. Miike’s film, starring Ryo Ishibashi opposite Eihi Shiina, arrived in the middle of the J-horror export wave that Ringu had set off, but Murakami’s story kept its horror at ground level: no ghosts, no curses, just a human being quietly coming apart. Shiina’s performance as Asami became the measuring stick every “woman scorned” horror villain since has been held up against.
That’s what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles.
Ryū Murakami, Audition
Murakami’s other major genre credit, Piercing, got its own English adaptation in 2018 courtesy of director Nicolas Pesce, and his 1997 novel In the Miso Soup — about an American tourist loose in Tokyo over New Year’s — won the Yomiuri Prize for Fiction. Neither reached the audience Audition did, but both still circulate among readers chasing the same matter-of-fact, queasy violence that runs through his best work.
His death lands only months after that of Koji Suzuki, the author of Ring, who died in May at 68 — making Murakami the second towering figure of the J-horror literary wave to die this year.
