A young designer considers murdering his creature

Translated with excellence by Albert Nolla, Piercing is a first-class novel written by the Japanese filmmaker and writer Ryu Murakami (1952). In the prologue —titled 'You are a strange child, and when you grow up you will go mad'— Jordi Nopca describes the author as one of the great references of psychothriller, "a literary subgenre in which psychopaths have as much weight as their pursuers and victims". The story begins with a minuscule and domestic gesture —a father waking up at night beside his daughter Rie's crib— and, in a matter of lines, turns it into a scene of extreme anguish. What seemed like a moment of paternal vigilance in a Tokyo home becomes a nocturnal ritual governed by a fixed idea: the possibility of plunging an ice pick into the creature's flesh. He does not do it; but what matters is that he contemplates the idea with a chilling lucidity.

The author constructs the novel from this mental precipice focused on inner rage. Masayuki Kawashima, the protagonist, is not a monster in the most conventional literary sense; he is a young man with a stable job as a designer, an affectionate partner, Yoko, and a newborn child. The life he has built seems like the ideal antidote to a shattered childhood. But beneath this calm surface, an ancient violence that has not disappeared boils, a voice, a dissociation, a neurosis, a pavor nocturnus. What makes Piercing unsettling is not so much the brutality —of which there is some— as the author's way of dissecting obsessive thought. Kawashima monitors himself with almost scientific meticulousness, and checks into a hotel in the city center for a week where he begins to plan a macabre murder. The man analyzes himself, justifies himself, calculates risks. Murakami portrays this rationalization mechanism with clinical coldness: the protagonist reaches the conclusion that, in order to preserve his family, he must divert his destructive impulse towards another body. The reasoning is delusional, but the internal logic is implacable.

Fascination with the wound

From here on, the novel adopts a spiral form. We know there will be a victim, a very Hitchcockian sensation: the reader has information that the characters do not, and this asymmetry makes each scene a small device of anguish. Murakami works with few spaces and even fewer characters, which accentuates the closed-room effect. When Chiaki Sanada (Aya) —a sadomasochistic prostitute— appears, the ideal counterpoint arrives: if Masayuki is violence directed outward, she represents violence against one's own body (self-harm). Both recognize each other in the geography of damage: they are biographies marked by childhood humiliation who have turned pain into a common language.

There is an evident fascination with wounds in Murakami. His novels, including Piercing, function as inventories of trauma: they enumerate the forms that violence can take in the contemporary world —domestic, sexual, psychological— and show how these cracks can grow to occupy an entire life. In this sense, the author belongs to a Japanese literary tradition that is not afraid to explore the moral degradation of the present, but he does so with his own aesthetic: dry, direct, unadorned. Perhaps the most disturbing thing is the normality that surrounds it all. Kawashima could be anyone: he has such an unremarkable existence that the brutality of his fantasies becomes even more unsettling. Murakami suggests that the border between an ordered life and the abyss is much more fragile than we would like to believe.

The novel is brief and progresses with a nervous, almost cinematic, speed. When the abrupt, cutting denouement arrives, the tension dissolves suddenly. Piercing can be read as a psychological horror thriller (violent, sexual, criminal), but also as an uncomfortable study of how pain is transmitted and transformed. Ryu Murakami does not seek so much to scandalize as to show the extent to which poorly healed wounds remain alive beneath the skin of adult characters. The result is a restless and unsettling novel, which advances with the same determination as the object that gives it its title: slow, precise, penetrating.