While his wife sleeps contentedly, a father hovers over the crib of his baby daughter, a penlight in one hand, ice pick in the other. Pressures are banking up inside the nervous system of a man who gets goose pimples while soaking in a scalding hot bath. Something is terribly wrong. Fast-forward to a call girl who sits on the edge of a bathtub, gouging her thigh with a Swiss army knife. Welcome to Murakamiland.
In the time-honored manner of the psycho-thriller novelist, Ryu Murakami constructs an edifice of harmony and contentment, only to savagely deconstruct it. Murakami's ideal home in this novel is a place of chemical wholesomeness, a TV studio kitchen interior where every surface has been swabbed and treated, every alien cell annihilated by pleasant-smelling toxins.
Touching the sensor plate to exit the apartment, the author's main subject, Kawashima Masayuki, notes — with a touch of irony given his own defects — that Tokyo's erosive social acid is lapping up to his own doorstep: "Not long before, someone apparently disguised as a delivery man had burgled one of the apartments; kids had been known to spray-paint graffiti on the lobby walls; and some jerk had once melted the intercom's plastic number pad with a lighter."