A darkly satirical tale of the
generation and gender gaps in Japanese society, Ruy
Murakami's Popular Hits of the Showa Era is a
literary karaoke act combining manga and street
culture It s a set-up like a video game: two
rival gangs fight to death for the control of a Tokyo
district. In one gang, six young losers committed only
to drinking, voyeurism and karaoke singing, in the other
six tough independent older women. From ambush to
revenge, both groups are gradually decimated until the
ultimate showdown. In Murakami's inimitably brutal
and brilliant style, Popular Hits dissects the
gender and generational conflicts of contemporary
society in a hilarious satire. Murakami is
mercilessly funny as he tracks his characters' evolution
from twits to scholars of guerrilla warfare' New
Yorker 'One of the funniest and strangest gang
wars in recent literature' Booklist Ryu
Murakami's Popular Hits From the Showa Era is
translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy and
published by Pushkin Press Born in 1952 in Nagasaki
prefecture, Ryu Murakami is the enfant
terrible of contemporary Japanese literature. Awarded
the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first
book, a novel about a group of young people drowned in
sex and drugs, he has gone on to explore with cinematic
intensity the themes of violence and technology in
contemporary Japanese society. His novels include
Coin Locker Babies, Sixty-Nine,
Popular Hits of the Showa Era,
Audition, In the Miso Soup and
From the Fatherland, with Love. Murakami is
also a screenwriter and a director; his films include
Tokyo Decadence, Audition and
Because of You.
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