Audition

Horror · Satire

Print length: 208 pagesBloomsbury UK, 2010

Description

Years after his wife’s death, Tokyo businessman Shigeharu Aoyama decides he may be ready to marry again. A film-producer friend proposes an unethical shortcut: stage a fictitious audition and use the applicants as a private pool of prospective partners. Among the women who appear, Aoyama becomes captivated by Asami Yamazaki, a reserved former dancer whose apparent vulnerability seems to match his ideal. Their courtship proceeds beneath the shadow of the deception that created it, while gaps in Asami’s history resist his attempts at reassurance. Audition shifts from social satire toward psychological horror, turning romantic selection into a disturbing confrontation with loneliness, fantasy, and the unequal power of looking without being seen.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Direct · Spare

Pace

Variable

Tone

Dark · Frightening · Tense · Unsettling

Structure

Linear

Focus

Atmosphere · Character · Relationships

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

GenderIsolationKnowledge and truthLoveObsessionPower

About Ryū Murakami

Ryū Murakami is a Japanese novelist, essayist, and filmmaker whose fiction examines alienation and appetite in the harsher reaches of modern Japan. His work moves among literary fiction, horror, satire, and the thriller, often placing damaged or compromised characters in environments shaped by drugs, sex, commerce, and violence. Rather than treating extremity as spectacle alone, he uses it to test how people adapt to social numbness, exploitation, and fear. Almost Transparent Blue builds its force through fragmented scenes and an accumulating atmosphere rather than conventional plot, while In the Miso Soup and Audition pair spare, direct narration with steadily tightening menace. Coin Locker Babies expands his interest in abandonment and urban damage into a denser, more expansive mode. Across these books, Murakami is especially attentive to setting: American military influence, Tokyo nightlife, and marginal urban spaces become pressures on character as much as backdrops. His forms vary, but his recurring method is a controlled confrontation with lives pushed toward excess and rupture.

In the Miso soup Open Library

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Language: English
ISBN: 9781408800720

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