AUDITION by Ryu Murukami

My Quip: In Need of an A24 Rewrite

Today’s Topic: Audition by Ryu Murakami

From the Top: Coming in at just under 200 pages, Audition is the literary equivalent of taking a slow elevator ride into hell—but only realizing it halfway down. Murakami’s novella is deceptively quiet at first, wrapping readers in a false sense of calm. The story follows Aoyama, a widower searching for a second chance at love through an elaborate "audition" scheme with his BFF. What begins as a melancholic study of loneliness in modern Japan quickly nosedives into a nightmare of obsession, manipulation, and razor-sharp horror.

My Quip: Audition desperately needs a modern rewrite. For all the vivid, visceral imagery Ryu Murakami delivers, the premise feels like a dusty relic from the late 90s—full of the kind of misogyny audiences come to expect (and roll their eyes at) from this genre. Swap the "audition" idea with some college frat bros scheming in a raunchy early-2000s dude flick, and the story would hardly change.

The only saving grace? Murakami’s sensory details. From the description of food to sex, Audition has a decadent pleasure to it—surprising for a late-90s Japanese novel. While hyper-detailed, hedonistic prose wasn’t typical of Japanese literature at the time, it was part of a broader trend among only certain authors. Writers like Ryu Murakami (In the Miso Soup) and Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood) experimented with vivid, visceral descriptions in different ways: Ryu Murakami leaned into shock value and sensory overload, while Haruki Murakami used detail to create melancholic, surreal atmospheres. Outside this niche, many modern Japanese authors of the period leaned more toward emotional restraint or lyrical simplicity. Murakami’s style, then, feels like an outlier designed to provoke—a hallmark of his particular brand of transgressive fiction.

But even that strength isn’t enough to carry the novel past its structural and thematic pitfalls. The supporting characters—the best friend and the son—are essentially furniture. They exist purely to amplify Aoyama’s doubts and to make his final reckoning a smidge more dramatic, but there’s no real depth or purpose to their inclusion. Consequently, the ending is less of a revelation and more of a half-hearted shrug. Aoyama doesn’t truly evolve; he just walks away shaken up and with a newfound appreciation for his son.

Let’s be real: Audition is begging for a A24 revamp. My pitch? Center the story on Yamasaki Asami. Her perspective is the most compelling—her life, her motives, her traumas. And, it’s 2025…..we need to make her older. The idea of a 24-year-old woman dating a 42-year-old man without a greater message to redeem it is icky. If we’re going to reclaim this story, Asami needs agency and complexity, not just a horrifying backstory and a ballet pose with some piano wire.

Tie it Off: If readers are into visceral, detailed prose and can tolerate a plot that feels like it fell out of a dusty DVD bargain bin, they should give Audition a shot. It is, after all, considered a cult-classic by some horror audiences. But honestly, this book reads more like a rough sketch of something greater—a blueprint for a story that could thrive in modern hands. Until that miracle happens, though, this one’s not making my must-read list.

Flavor Profile: Spicy….for like two seconds. Stale.