This first novel by a twenty-four-year-old Japanese student was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. One and a half million copies were sold in six months, and the book sparked passions. Japanese critics spoke of a "revolutionary sensitivity," a "gaze like a camera zoom," a "filter of lucidity, through which the rawest violence and eroticism acquire a strange purity." However, Murakami was also accused of systematically cultivating pornography and brutality. In the United States, Newsweek recommended it as "a mix of Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Camus's The Stranger." The protagonists of this novel, mostly very young boys and girls, live near an American base, consuming all kinds of drugs, going to rock concerts, organizing orgies for the Yankee soldiers, all without apparent passion or pleasure. With emblematic passivity, they slide toward self-destruction, as a result not only of their present situation but also of their blocked future. The author's treatment, cold and unsentimental, nevertheless distills a feeling of something pure and untainted. His technique, with its absence of taboos, moral condemnations, and superfluous details, approaches cinéma-vérité, with touches of surrealism.
