In the Miso Soup has been called many things, most of them not true. You’ll hear it called, over and over, “The Japanese [Something]”. The Japanese Silence of the Lambs. The Japanese American Psycho (hey, I can grok it). Et cetera. None hit really close to the truth, which is fitting, because the novel’s about looking the other way, and deliberately missing the point.

The story isn’t much. It’s barely even a story. Kenji is a sex tourism guide for thrill-seeking gaijin, and he ends up working for a genuinely odd duck called Frank, an American who claims to be missing a section of his brain, and who might just be the serial killer stalking Shinjuku. Kenji and the rest of the story’s characters (including his girlfriend Jun) struggle to be two dimensional, and mostly exist as sounding boards and emotional foils for Frank, who carries the bulk of the story.

Frank’s a kind of prism through which we see the various contradictory aspects of Japanese society. Prudish, conservative…but you’d never see groups of schoolgirls selling sex to middle aged men in the United States. The idea that Japan embodies “too much, yet too little” has been done before, but Murakami bulldozes it into your head. Frank’s behavior seems abhorrent, but it doesn’t seem implausible that he’d go to Japan to commit these acts, rather than another country. Frank and Japan seem to fit together, in a weird way.

In the Miso Soup plays pretty loose ball with conventions on how to structure a novel. The big climax hits exactly halfway through, and much of the rest of novel is spent in incessant talkiness. Western gore porn novels make a mess and then fade to black. This novel deigns to show the emotional clean-up process afterwards, as well. There’s long periods of didacticism: at a certain point comparisons to Sade seem apt, as Murakami virtually forgets he’s telling a story and just directly reads you the riot act on some philosophical ideas for a page or two.

But the ideas are all compelling and heartfelt ones. Like the more famous Murakami, sometimes you can’t discern what his exact point is, but you can tell there always is one.

Props are due to translator Ralph F. McCarthy, who avoids the tin-eared “upmarket Babelfish” tone Japanese to English novels can sometimes have, and makes the prose eerie, uneasy, and alive. In his hands, Murakami’s version Shinjuku becomes a neon-lit abattoir that disturbs, unsettles, and most of all, convinces. Sometimes Japanese novels hold English readers at arms length because of the translation. Here, it doesn’t, no matter how much you might wish it so.

It’s not especially similar to any Western novel I can recall reading. At certain points, it’s even hard to tell if you’re having a good time. But if you want a compelling journey through the grease-traps of Japanese society, Murakami’s work is very thick soup indeed.

Here’s West Hunter with an example of how following long inductive chains can cause you to arrive at wrong conclusions that perhaps end in Iraq getting buried in a ten-foot-deep layer of white phosphorus.

I would like to supply a similar case.

In 1989, a Missouri-class battleship called the USS Iowa was test-firing its 16-inch guns. Something went wrong. As explosive charges were loaded into the breech of gun turret number two, they suddenly detonated, sending the explosion back into the turret crew. Forty-seven servicemen died in a wash of fire.

How did it happen? The gun barrel in question was cold. No cold weapon had ever caused a spontaneous explosion in all of recorded maritime history. Navy investigators found traces of brake fluid, calcium hypochlorite, and steel wool inside the barrel. The remains of a sabotage device?

The story developed an interesting Brokeback Mountain-esque winkle when it was revealed that Clayton Hartwig, captain of the centre gun, had been in a covert relationship with a sailor in the turret crew. What’s more, he’d been in charge of the loading operation. Was this an act of revenge from a jilted lover? Both men had died in the explosion.

Elaborate theories of sabotage and murder-suicide looked right past the real reason for the explosion. Additional bags of explosives called “trim bags” are normally inserted into the main charge to correct for weight variations. Unlike the explosives in the main charge, the “trim bags” are not tightly packed, making them susceptible to the shock of the gun’s power-driven rammer. The Iowa, incidentally, had a rammer that forced the bagged explosives into the breech 0.6 meters further than regulation guidelines, and with greater force. The explosive charges remain stable under heavy pressure, but the loosely-packed trim bags were very unstable under those conditions.

A second technical inquiry established that the chemical remains in the gun barrel were most likely from a mixture of cleaning fluid, lubricants, and seawater. No reason to suspect conscious sabotage.

Finally, a test rig was built that simulated the Iowa’s 16-inch cannon, as well as the over-ramming. It was done five times, ten times, fifteen times, but nothing happened.

The testers persisted. As Nassim Taleb would point out fifteen years later, you have to make outliers part of your plan. Even if cold explosions almost never happen, you cannot escape the awful tyranny of that “almost”.

On the 18th test, the charge exploded inside the cold barrel, blowing the test rig apart.

If you’re part of the crowd that wants nothing more than to resurrect Lovecraft and strap a rocket jetpack to his back, then who better to read than Nick Mamatas, Lovecraft superfan par excellence? It’s hard to forget instances like this comprehensive defense of Lovecraft’s prose, and how HPL’s odd word choices like “cyclopean” are actually the ones that fit the scene. It serves as a reminder to never, ever, argue with a superfan about their topic of interest. They’ll make you look like chopped liver.

The Nickronomicon fuses old and new in a way that feels fresh, yet familiar. The familiarity comes from D.M. Mitchell’s impressive but now fairly obscure The Starry Wisdom, another collection that tried to put Lovecraft and postmodernism on the same page (literally), and which I suspect had somewhat of an influence on these stories. One of the Starry Wisdom writers gets a co-writing credit here, for example.

Nickronomicon has all the gore, tentacles, and trans-dimensional spit-swapping you’d expect, but these things share space with Mamatas’s take on the everyman, which are usually writers, downtrodden beatnik types, or fetishistic Lovecraft enthusiasts. At times things get pretty self-referential, with some stories taking potshots at the Lovecraft fandom itself.

“Brattleboro Days, Yuggoth Nights” is a brief but enticing story-through-a-peephole affair that consists of a series of vague and nearly unreadable communications, apparently between HPL and an amateur press enthusiast. Lots of people have tried to the “what if Lovecraft was really on to something?” approach, but I liked this one for its brevity and subtlety. “And Then, And Then, And Then” is even shorter, and revolves around a developmentally challenged person’s encounter with unknown. Again, it’s weird fiction, but there’s a filter in the way – a filter of modernity that doesn’t destroy the weirdness but colors it, makes it seem different somehow.

There’s a fair amount of humor and jokiness. I liked how Mamatas doesn’t treat Lovecraft’s material as fresh virgin snow, but acknowledges that our culture has been strip mining him for more than fifty years (Cthulhu plush toy dolls, and all the rest). The Lovecraft mythos is now shot through with a fair amount of ridiculousness, and he’s not afraid to poke fun at the excesses of fandom, especially in “Mainevermontnewhampshire”, where we see this encounter between a writer and a fan.

“Hi, it’s me,” said the kid, who was actually wearing a tuxedo. “Remember me, from the Lenore Awards banquet, when you won the lifetime achievement award? I wore what I was wearing then in case you came, so you’d remember me.” “You’re my biggest fan,” Sam said. “ … Jeremy?” That was a safe guess. Everyone under the age of thirty seemed to be named Jeremy these days.Jeremy beamed. “You do remember me! I’m so glad I was able to make it. I spent years submitting stories, but finally, one got published. Do you read Dark Somethings, Mister Bey?” It was a photocopied zine that Sam received in the mail every eighteen months or so. He found that the paper stock was good for rolling joints, so appreciated the free subscription.

Ultimately, Nickronomicon rests upon strong and original stories. It’s not the most creative take on Lovecraft, or the best written, but it could end up being one of the most enduring…perhaps because its written by a superfan.