Coin Locker Babies

I felt like I've been reading this book FOREVER now, yet when I went to look at the reading statistics, I finished it in 10 hours. Rip my attention span? I got curious about the wordcount though, since it took me 5 hours to complete Stoner, so I went on some random wordcount page that told me Stoner and Coin Locker Babies are pretty close in the wordcount. I thought it was impossible, so I downloaded some Calibre plugin and lo and behold I was correct, Coin Locker Babies has almost double the wordcount, which makes perfect sense. It was 700 pages long on my ereader, when Stoner was like.. 400 maybe. Weird!

Anyway, word counts aside, this was a very aggressive and raw book. The plot and the characters were superior to In the Miso Soup, although I highly enjoyed the Tokyo nightlife being described in that book too. Ryu Murakami is a big fan of portraying people one would describe as the dregs of humanity. I'll address a few small problems with this book - first of which is just entirely subjective and probably dependent on my mood - I had a hard time getting through the start. The first 50 pages dragged on and on in my mind, but once I found myself in the right setting I guess, one which really fit the general mood of the novel (I'd describe it as a very hot, sweaty summer day) I started breezing through it. And so, I ended up finishing the book relatively quickly, considering my lack of free time. The second little problem I had with the book was that it seems a few plot points have been hmm abandoned? Along with a few characters I guess. I wish there was more to Tatsuo and Emiko for example, and I wish Toxitown in general played a larger role. The place seems to only appear as a transitional location where the two brothers reunite, but the first chapter it appeared in with Anemone made it seem like so much more. It's a shame because Toxitown was an interesting imaginary setting which seemed to represent a place (and feelings) born out of ww2 and the atomic bombs... It feels like Hashi's realization about Anemone also seems to have been skipped over... Other than that, I really enjoyed how the whole plot was thrown together, including the ending.

I described this book earlier as aggressive and raw, so I guess I should at least give a small plot summary. The story is centered around two brothers, not by blood, but by the way they were born. They were born into coin lockers (a common way for mothers to abandon their infants in 1970-90s Japan, but it still happens today) and were essentially left to die. They ended up being rescued but that experience has defined their whole lives, entrapping both of them in unique ways. Combine this crushing backstory with Murakami's propensity for absurd violence which is extremely vivid and surreal despite it being just written text and you've got this explosive novel about destruction and entrapment.