Japanese novelist and filmmaker Ryu Murakami has died at 74. Publisher Gentosha announced on 23 October that he died at home on 17 October. His work ranged from the prize-winning Almost Transparent Blue to Audition and Coin Locker Babies. British publisher Pushkin Press paid tribute to a writer whose fiction also reached cinema audiences.
Japanese novelist and filmmaker Ryu Murakami has died at 74. His death on 17 October became public on 23 October.[1], [2]
His publisher Gentosha said he died at home. Murakami wrote more than forty novels and short-story collections, often dealing with violence, drug use, sexuality and social exclusion. Born in Sasebo, in Japan’s Nagasaki prefecture, in 1952, he was the son of two teachers.[1]
Murakami published his debut, Almost Transparent Blue, in 1976 after writing it as a student. It follows disillusioned young people through a narrator called Ryū and won the Gunzo prize for new writers and the Akutagawa prize. Coin Locker Babies, his third novel, concerns abandoned children and won the Noma literary new face prize.[1]
Some books became films directed by Murakami himself or other filmmakers. Takashi Miike’s 1999 adaptation of Audition follows a widower staging fake auditions to find a girlfriend. Adam Freudenheim, publisher and managing director of Britain’s Pushkin Press, expressed condolences and described publishing Murakami in English as a privilege. Bloomsbury also publishes his translated work in Britain.[1]
