Ryu Murakami was born in 1952 in Nagasaki prefecture, 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 Piercing, 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. Ralph McCarthy is a noted translator, whose translations include Ryu Murakami’s Audition, In the Miso Soup, Piercing, Sixty-Nine, and From The Fatherland, With Love. He is also the translator of two collections of stories by Osamu Dazai—Self Portraits and Blue Bamboo, as well as Fairy-Tale Book of Dazai Osamu.