“Murakami first came to public attention with his scabrous, decadent Almost Transparent Blue, seemingly inspired by his reckless, youthful days near the alien temptations of a US naval base. American pop culture and hegemony often features in his stories, sometimes as an indicator of the lack of affect or nihilism to be found in Japan’s Blank Generation, manifesting as foreign serial killers, womanizers and drug pushers preying upon the passively indifferent Japanese.”

From my entry in the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction on the writer Ryu Murakami, who died this month.

“…maybe it’s just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don’t hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts.”