Ryu Murakami, the Japanese novelist and filmmaker behind “Almost Transparent Blue,” died at his home Oct. 17, according to his publisher, Gentosha. He was 74.
Gentosha announced his death Oct. 23, according to Deadline, closing a five-decade career that spanned literature and film and began with a debut novel he wrote as a university student. The cause of death was not disclosed. The family held a private funeral and asked that the public refrain from condolence visits, monetary offerings, flowers, telegrams or other gifts.
Murakami was born in Sasebo, in Nagasaki Prefecture, in 1952. Despite the shared surname, he was not related to novelist Haruki Murakami.
A Literary Career That Started in College
Murakami made his writing debut in 1976 while still a student at Musashino Art University. “Almost Transparent Blue,” his raw portrait of young people drifting through sex and drugs near a U.S. military base, won the 19th Gunzo New Writers’ Award and the 75th Akutagawa Prize, two of Japan’s most prominent literary honors. It became a massive bestseller, too. Hardcover and paperback sales combined have reached about 3.5 million copies, according to Jiji Press, making it one of the defining debuts in modern Japanese fiction.
He followed that breakthrough with “Coin Locker Babies,” a 1980 novel about children abandoned in train station lockers as infants, which earned him the 3rd Noma Literary New Writers’ Prize in 1981. In 1994, Murakami published “A World Five Minutes Later,” a novel set in an alternate reality in which Japan did not surrender during World War II. His 1997 novel “In the Miso Soup” won the 49th Yomiuri Literary Prize, cementing his reputation as one of Japan’s most honored contemporary authors.
Horror fans may know him best for “Audition,” his novel about a lonely widower who stages a fake casting call to find a new wife. Director Takashi Miike’s film adaptation became a cult classic of Japanese horror.
From Page to Screen
Murakami did not limit his storytelling to the page. He wrote and directed films based on his own novels. “Tokyo Decadence” (1992) follows a college student working as a call girl in early-1990s Tokyo. “Kyoko” (1996) tracks a young Japanese woman who travels to New York in search of the Cuban American GI who taught her to dance as a child, only to find him dying.
He reached a wide audience on television as well, spending about two decades as the lead interviewer on TV Tokyo’s business talk show “Cambrian Palace.”
Across all three mediums, Murakami returned repeatedly to outsiders, economic upheaval and the undercurrents of Japanese society, subjects that ran through “Almost Transparent Blue” and carried into his later novels and films. Tributes poured in after Gentosha’s announcement, including one from video game creator Hideo Kojima on X.
What’s Next
As of publication, no public memorial service has been announced following the private family funeral. Gentosha has not said whether any unpublished or unfinished work will be released.
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