Content area
Full Text
In 1976 Murakami Ryu won the Akutagawa Prize and the Gunzo Prize for New Writers for his Kagirinaku tomei ni chikai buru (Almost Transparent Blue; 1977), which he himself later made into a film. The work, together with the film version, turned out to be an instant success on account, in part, of its explicit depiction of a group of young drug addicts and their sexual depravity.
The present volume, Ekusutashii (Ecstasy), treats the same subject matter with a much more intensified sense of violence and self destruction. Sexually oriented madness, amplified by the use of an aphrodisiac called "Ecstasy" (hence the Japanese title), inevitably leads to the loss of human dignity. One...