Popular Hits of the Showa Era

Second-Hand

Excellent Condition

A darkly satirical tale of the generation and gender gaps in Japanese society, Ryu Murakami's Popular Hits of the Showa Era is a literary karaoke act combining manga and street culture.

In his most irreverent novel yet, Ryu Murakami creates a rivalry of epic proportions between six aimless youths and six tough-as-nails women who battle for control of a Tokyo neighbourhood.

At the outset, the young men seem louche but harmless, their activities limited to drinking, snacking, peering at a naked neighbour through a window, and performing karaoke.

The six "aunties" are fiercely independent career women. When one of the boys executes a lethal ambush of one of the women, chaos ensues. The women band together to find the killer and exact revenge.

In turn, the boys buckle down, study physics, and plot to take out their nemeses in a single blast. Who knew that a deadly "gang war" could be such fun?

Murakami builds the conflict into a hilarious, spot-on satire of modern culture and the tensions between the sexes and generations.

In Murakami's inimitably brutal and brilliant style, Popular Hits dissects the gender and generational conflicts of contemporary society in a hilarious satire. Translated from the Japanese by Ralph McCarthy.