Coin Locker Babies

Coin Locker Babies is Ryu Murakami's cult cyperpunk novel.

Two babies are left in a Tokyo station coin locker and survive against the odds, but their lives are forever tainted by this inauspicious start.

As they grow up, they join the ranks of Toxitown: a district of addicts, freaks and prostitutes. One becomes a bisexual rock star and looks for his mother, while the other one, an athlete, seeks revenge. This savage and stunning story unfolds in a surrealistic whirl of violence.

Coin Locker Babies is translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder and published by Pushkin Press

'A cyber-Bildungsroman of playful breadth and uncertain depth' Publishers Weekly

'A fascinating peek into the weirdness of contemporary Japan' Oliver Stone

'Like a cross between a Grimms fairy tale and Katsuhiro Otomo's classic manga comic series Akira... A deliriously ambitious novel... recalls Thomas Pynchon.' Ben Jeffery, Times Literary Supplement

A great big pulsating parable . . . wildly undisciplined, occasionally tongue-in-cheek.' Washington Post

'The explosive rhythms of hard rock, the intensity of emotions, and the highly vivid images make . . . Murakami's postmodern novel an exceptionally successful one' World Literature Today

Ryu Murakami is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature. Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first book, a novel about a group of young people drowned in sex and drugs, he has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society. His novels include Coin Locker Babies, Sixty-Nine, Popular Hits of the Showa Era, Audition, In the Miso Soup and From the Fatherland, with Love.

Murakami is also a screenwriter and a director; his films include Tokyo Decadence, Audition and Because of You.