"What are you doing?"

Piercing – Ryu Murakami (trans. Ralph McCarthy)

  

            When essentially the opening image of a book is that of a father handling an ice-pick while overlooking his sleeping baby and the father is trying to resist the strong desire to stab his baby daughter with said ice pick....you can quickly ascertain that this is not going to be a “ho-hum” average tale.  There is little middle ground: the book will either be terribly memorable or just plain terrible.

            Luckily, I found this is the former!  Kawashima, the above mentioned father, feels compelled to stab his sleeping newborn daughter with an icepick as he stands above her in her crib.  Not wanting to actually stab his sleeping child, but this is a compulsion of his.  He's stabbed someone with an icepick before.   So, he decides he must instead stab someone and make it look like a copy-cat murder to get over this compulsion, thereby saving his baby from being stabbed.

This leads to a story of essentially two people: Kawashima, the somewhat perverse, psychotic yet normal-seeming hunter, and his unknowing prey, a young call-girl named Sanda Chiaki.   With the reader seeing the story unfold from both of Chiaki and Kawashima’s viewpoints, the tension of the story is ratcheted up with the two characters thinking completely different things about the same shared situation.  

Babies and ice picks do not go together like chocolate and peanut butter! Photo Source

            I had actually disliked the other book I had read by Ryu Murakami's prior to picking up this up (Murakami's 69); however, Piercing is a taught, suspenseful, and haunting tale that grabbed me from the opening scene.  I found almost impossible to put down.  I generally don’t go for horror, but this was difficult to pull myself away from, even to just to grab something to drink. 

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.