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.