To finish out our month-long odyssey into the complex, always-beautiful, often-warped, and sometimes-downright-depraved cinema and art of Japan, we have a twisted, lascivious semi-biographical novel by Ryū Murakami about a group of disillusioned teens living near a US military base in 1970s Fussa.

Ryū Murakami’s debut novel Almost Transparent Blue is a shocking, nihilistic document of teenage alienation and aimless passion that immediately resonated with readers upon its release in 1976. Its raw depiction of rampant drug use, senseless violence, and transgressive sex acts spoke to a new generation of rage-filled Japanese youth whose political and cultural tastes had evolved well past the prevailing ethos of previous decades.

Written from the first-person perspective and heavily influenced by the author’s own experiences living in the shadow of what amounted to a US occupation, Murakami writes about troubled desperation as if it were poetic revelation, with an evocative surrealist style and keen observational sense, and always with loud, angry music filling the room. A short novel and a sure page-turner, this novel is a great primer on Japan’s uniquely salacious artistic sensibilities during the era of Pinku films and punk rock, and in fact was adapted into an anarchic 1979 film by Murakami himself.

Write Brain TV is proud to present this wildly entertaining and disturbed debut classic from Japan’s leading literary provocateur!