Title: Disturbances: bile, semen, snot, vomit, and saliva.
Product review: Into the abyss. Never has such a short book felt so agonizingly long. Murakami's book is a study in the many nadirs of Japanese drug users in the 1970s. Their relationships are strained, the drugs are addictive and horrible, and sanitation is absent. The book feels exaggerated and stylized, as if the author magnified his own experiences five-fold. There's a kind of cool glossiness in the tone. This distance partly works: the characters feel like walking dead, but partly creates a kind of depraved allure. In the end, the book could be read as a "just say no to drugs" scree: its people are empty and unreflective. Redemption is no where to be seen--not for its characters or for the novel.
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