Almost Transparent Blue
Ryu Murakami
<i>Almost Transparent Blue</i> is a brutal tale of lost youth in a Japanese
port town close to an American military base. Murakami?s image-intensive
 narrative paints a portrait of a group of friends locked in a
destructive cycle of sex, drugs and rock?n?roll. The novel is all but
plotless, but the raw and often violent prose takes us on a
rollercoaster ride through reality and hallucination, highs and lows, in
 which the characters and their experiences come vividly to life.
Trapped in passivity, they gain neither passion nor pleasure from their
adventures. Yet out of the alienation, boredom and underlying rage and
grief emerges a strangely quiet and almost equally shocking beauty. Ryu
Murakami?s first novel, Almost Transparent Blue won the coveted
Akutagawa literary prize and became an instant bestseller. Representing a
 sharp and conscious turning away from the introspective trend of
postwar Japanese literature, it polarized critics and public alike and
soon attracted international attention as an alternative view of modern
Japan.