Neither the overly-simplistic pop art cover on my copy of Popular Hits of the Showa Era nor a brief listen through the 20th century tunes referenced in the title could have prepared me for the shocking, grotesque romp through the dark underbelly of humanity that Ryu Murakami subjected me to through his 1994 novel. Had I read the Japanese version (above right), I might have been a little more prepared for the insanity soon to unfold.
The music has less connection with the content of the book than you might expect, but it certainly does inspire a curiosity as to how each of the main characters can belt out ballads of young love and nostalgic memory while simultaneously planning and committing absurd crimes of thoughtless, nauseating cruelty.
I found little online in the way of playlists with the songs which Murakami arrested as chapter titles, so I created one of my own on Youtube (also embedded below). The book’s lead single, Pinky and the Killers’ “Season of Love,” serves as a backing track to an utterly jarring introduction to the two mutually antagonistic conglomerates of degeneracy which inhabit the book. The first chapter is punctuated by the first of many shocking episodes which make you question if you should even be reading Popular Hits in a public place.
This first chapter sparks a lethal turf war between six utterly irredeemable young men and six (now five) hapless and harmless divorcees. It is not merely the characters themselves, but in fact the narrator’s voice in describing them and their actions, that defines the novel.
Calling the boys “ill-adjusted” would be incorrect as it implies they were at any point capable of living as social beings. This may sound harsh, but Murakami’s deliberate and thorough dehumanization of his characters is a trademark of this novel. Pages upon pages are spent on destroying any twinge of empathy the reader may have for each character, to the point that the group seems to be composed less of individual humans rather than of a few post-adolescent blobs of algae. The amalgamation of these listless chunks of pond scum occurred through an accidental habit of meeting weekly at one moldy apartment or the next, “parties” which consist of alcohol, rock-paper-scissors tournaments, bouts of incongruent maniacal laughter, and raucous costumed karaoke nights at an abandoned parking lot by the coast.
The boys’ only commonality is the fact that they are each incapable of human connection. The reader quickly learned that it is not necessary to remember their names, nor which character has a well-off family background and which one has the strange, as of yet unconsummated obsession with stabbing (at least not until these off-hand details become plot points of varying importance).
The boys’ opponents are a group of domestic-minded mothers, wives, and ex-wives bound only by a shared first name of Midori. The absurdity of this connection underlines Murakami’s even more intensely vitriolic descriptions of female characters throughout the book. The Midori’s, despite still being in their thirties and early forties, are labeled as Oba-san, a term for middle-aged women wielded detrimentally by the narrator of the book and most other characters. They are certainly quirky and also quite socially inept, but nothing out of the ordinary when compared to the boys. The Midoris have much stronger character development, but the narrator’s unchanging appraisal limits their growth in the mind of the reader. This is the aspect of Popular Hits that makes me struggle to recommend the book. Murakami’s treatment of the female characters is so degrading that the book could reach past satirically uncomfortable into unbearable for certain readers (including myself).
Casual episodes of sexual assault and pedophilic fantasies by the male characters are brushed away by the over-the-top absurdity that seem almost designed to distract from the all-too-familiar depravity that precedes it. The narrator simultaneously objectifies and violates the female characters, then immediately dismisses them by turning to another bit of blood-stained tomfoolery. If the goal is to criticize societal ills through hyperbole, the novel does not achieve it. The narrative does nothing to facilitate a reassuring interpretation. The dark realities which Murakami remorselessly inflicts on his characters are immediately overcome by distractions of cartoonish violence, like attending an outdoor reenactment of all the most hideous crimes from yesterdays’ news and then being expected to laugh when a clown shows up and painstakingly murders a cow with a dull knife for the barbecue afterwards. When the dust clears at the end of a chapter and you take a moment to reflect, you wonder if the humor is achieving anything of merit. We don’t have to look for altruism in every novel, but the off-handed assumptions of depravity this one struck me as particularly unwelcome and unjustified.
In this way, my relationship with the narrator of Popular Hits had the same stomach-turning effect of looking up from a particularly off-kilter take on a parmesan-dusted salad to a chef with snowbanks of dandruff on his shoulders asking how I’m enjoying the food. There is a certain level to which you want to believe that salad really is delicious, but the intuitive part of your appetite has already made the judgment for you. Nothing in this novel indicates that Murakami donned a toque before whipping up the meal.
That said, there were aspects of the absurdity that were enjoyable. As the war between the young men and Midoris escalates, Murakami pivots the narrative in the span of a few sentences through ridiculously convenient plot points. At the scene of a crime, the murderer drops a button commemorating a high score at one specific arcade with a wall of fame featuring his picture. Within a few paragraphs, a new side character happily supplies a highly illegal weapon, but only after confirming that it is indeed going to be used to murder a middle-aged lady. These idiotic events turn the narrative on a dime to keep it flowing well, making the novel quite easy to follow from a plot perspective. The substantial amount of page space wasted on denigrating the characters to insects is made up by these quick pivots.
Popular Hits of the Showa Era, and, indeed, Murakami himself, divides opinion. The absurdity surely has its value for fans of subversive comedy, and from a literary point of view, I enjoyed the construction of the story. The way Murakami unflinchingly ends the novel without a shred of remorse for the horror he penned could be interpreted as admirable in the same way that the Joachim Phoenix Joker’s late-night TV “shebang” is a heroic ending. Given that Hits’ characters are radically, intentionally less empathetic, I struggle to rationalize the violence but recognize that it is a matter of artistic opinion.
For me, the humor didn’t quite outweigh the sadistic recklessness in treatment of the characters that made the narrator so inaccessible. I remain hopeful for a few levels of abstraction between the author and the narrator, but I still struggle to find anything meaningful after the resolution of the story. Putting the book down, I find myself relieved that it’s over, in the sense that I’m glad to have some distance between myself and that ink on those pages. Whether Murakami considers that appraisal a success or not depends on those potential abstractions between himself and the narrator.
For now, I’ll put some actual hits of Showa Era on the record player and be glad I live anywhere but Chofu. Take a look at the playlist below and enjoy a few tunes.
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Popular Hits of the Showa Era - All Chapter Song Playlist
Find the playlist for all of the songs featured in chapter titles of Ryu Murakami's Popular Hits of the Showa Era below.
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